Whenever you think anti-smoking activists have scraped the bottom of every barrel, they plumb new depths. Taking Liberties reports an almost unbelievable new anti-smoking advert in France that makes a bizarre connection between smoking and sexual abuse. You can see the ad here. Taking Liberties comments:
"As far as I know, practising fellatio doesn't cause cancer," said a spokeswoman for the Movement for Women's Liberation. I think this misses the point of the advertisement which, as I see it, implies that under-age smoking is on a par with a teenager being forced to have (oral) sex with a middle-aged man (ie child abuse or sexual assault if not rape).
Or am I reading too much into this?
I don't think he is reading too much into it and nor does The Strait Times:
Child sex anti-smoking ad
Deliberately shocking anti-smoking adverts that compare nicotine addiction to sexual abuse, and which the French government has vowed to ban, sparked a lively debate on Wednesday.
The ads show a man pushing a kneeling child's face towards his crotch. Two feature boys and one a girl. The children look fearfully up at him, holding in their mouth a cigarette that appears to protrude from his fly. Under the image runs the slogan: 'Smoking makes you a slave to tobacco.'
There is so much wrong with this campaign that it is hard to know where to begin. It should be emphasised that this is not an official government campaign. It comes from France's Non-Smokers' Rights Association (who funds them, I wonder, and what does this ad have to do with nonsmokers' rights?) The health minister and the minister for families have both spoken out against the ad.
But that fact that anyone could (a) come up with such an idea, and (b) go through with it, gives you some idea of how warped these people's minds are. This is, to use activist parlance, 'the next logical step' in a campaign that knows no limits of taste and whose values have become hopelessly twisted. It is the product of an ideology that says that smoking is bad therefore anything that is anti-smoking must be acceptable. As I have long said, this fallacious reasoning leads us down a very dangerous road.
Whether it's the quack science of second- and third-hand smoke, or ads like this, the failure of normal people to speak out and bring some measure of sense and proportion has allowed the lunatics to run free. Obsessive and mentally unbalanced individuals have found a crusade which allows them to act without restraint or reason.
Ads like this are the inevitable outcome of denormalisation. Ironically, they serve only to expose the people behind them as being far from normal. Their mask of sanity is slipping.