Dude! Take your hands off my hookah!

I wrote earlier about the smoking ban in Virginia and mentioned bootleggers and baptists. It appears that the law doesn't make an exception for hookah bars. In discussions about this, two claims have been made to me about why the ban is a good idea. One is that people are "forced" to go to bars that have smoking and it poses a health risk to them (iffy logic in my mind). The second is that people who work at these places are the real concern. They are "required" to be there and apparently have no other options for employment (does that sound preposterous to anyone else?). Well, here we seem to have a problem with both premises. What about places where the idea of smoking is embedded directly into the reason for the place existing? It seems like it violates both of the afforementioned rules. My personal favorite part of this is that private smoking clubs, which are almost exclusively patronized by upper class white males are exempted from this ban, yet hookah bars, which are essentially the same thing only for the rest of us are banned.

Kaine's Chief of Staff's response to this is priceless. He says, "This is a bill that is intended to protect the health of the workers, and you have to be consistent" in applying the law."

Several things that are angering me about this that I'm not going to discuss in depth:
Killing jobs while in a rescession
Why no one is mentioning that this could easily be seen as racist/classist given the populations most directly affected
How this fits perfectly into the slippery slope argument on the nanny state
I don't mean to harp on this. I really thought I was over this. But the guy is going after HOOKAH's! Every college kid in the state should be up in arms!