Our culture, so "liberal" and so radical, which does not miss an opportunity to declare its indignation over crusades (but refers to the Catholic ones of 900 years ago!), periodically finds categories of "sinners" against which to unleash its own crusades. The call to arms comes, of course, from the United States, which has created the new dogma of political correctness. According to this "table of values" there are categories of untouchables, that is, of people who have been spared from original sin: women, homosexuals, blacks, Jews, the young handicapped, intellectuals, and HIV-positive persons. Those who belong to these groups are sheltered from any criticism: whatever they do, they are always innocent and the fault falls on others. 

The need of every society to find a devil, an enemy, an infidel, has been focused toward a few groups, first among them, smokers. They are "the ugly, the dirty, and the bad", sinners in need of redemption through any means necessary. And if they refuse redemption, they must be punished mercilessly. It is the eternal Pharisee who needs to thank his God, because he feels he is morally superior to the publican. Since the morally inferior cannot be identified in traditional categories, which have been made untouchable by hegemonic conformity, the Pharisee's impulse is now unleashed against the tobacco consumer. What can this consumer invoke in his defence? Perhaps smoking is not responsible for everything it is accused of (from bad cases of haemorrhoids to the housewife's bad knee); but that it is good for you cannot be sustained -- although pre-Columbian priests considered this plant sacred, and European doctors have prescribed tobacco as a medicine for a long time. I am always moved when I think of the story of Bernadette going to Nevers to become a novice; the only object of value she had with her was the box of tobacco that the doctor had prescribed for relief from asthma. Can smokers invoke the now-revered word "minority"? Probably not, because THIS minority did not go through the process of the beatification of political correctness. Therefore, this beatification does not apply to the smoker, who is guilty of being addicted to a drug that is no longer elegant or fashionable, and relegated to the status of the Hispanic immigrant of other times. Tolerance is reserved to better classes of drug addicts, those using such substances as heroin, cocaine and the like - a category to which the smoker does not belong.

The obsession reaches the grotesque. The death rows of the prisons of the United States are, as we all know, very crowded. But in the prison cells those who are waiting for the death chamber must be subject to a rigorous no-smoking regime. They have to die but - my goodness! - it better be with their lungs free of phlegm. We will not indulge, since everyone knows already, other equally grotesque contradictions, such as the cigarette packs on which the nations force to print threatening warnings, even while the same nations make the greatest gain from cigarettes. We could go on, but what has been said perhaps is sufficient to warn the Christians who would like to participate in an ennobling battle - a crusade - from joining the anti-tobacco fanatics. Those who believe in the Evangelists must never forget that hypocrisy is the cause of Jesus' greatest indignation. And hypocrisy abounds here. There are many more examples aside from the ones mentioned above, such as the fact that apostles of the fight against smoking turn out to be, in most cases, the very same who want to make abortion as permissive as possible. Well, we have reached the point of asking that pregnant women who are unable to give up a cigarette be confined to special internment camps: the state must deport them for months to clinics in which they are watched so that, because of the damned tobacco, they do not damages the foetuses - but only those foetuses, however, that it has been decided are not to be ripped from the uterus with the very "civilised" IVG (a politically correct name for abortion). Attention and treatment are then administered - even by using the police - but only for those foetuses that have been spared from the roulette of "I keep it, I discard it.". And here comes another inhuman hypocrisy: the same no-smoking "crusaders" even propose that the usual State (they call themselves liberals but they invoke the gendarmes at every occasion) refuses to treat those who have damaged their health with smoking. What would happen if somebody were to call for the same thing for those homosexuals who have contracted AIDS through sodomy? Surely, there would be an indignant reaction, for the gays are always and at any rate "good". Smokers are always and at any rate "evil". So there you have it, tobacco addicts: you deserve to suffer while abandoned by medicine, and in social contempt.

But, just in passing on the subject of hypocrisy, what about the [former] U.S. president, Great Priest of Political Correctness, and, thus, never satisfied by ever more repressive laws against smokers? What about Mr. Clinton, who (as we all well know) used to keep cigars in his office, not - horror - to smoke them, but to use them in more ennobling practices?

Vittorio Messori