'Smoking Allowed' Restaurant Faces Lawsuit

A sign on the door of Charlie's Drive-In Restaurant in Martinsville, Indiana, reads: "This restaurant allows smoking. If this offends you, please feel free to visit one of our competitors. If you choose to come in, then you enter at your own risk. Thank you."

Sounds perfectly reasonable, no? Different strokes for different folks, and all that? But reason has long gone out the window in the authorities' ever-bolder anti-smoking campaign, replaced by state-sanctioned, my-way-or-the-highway extremism. The restaurant now faces a lawsuit, and will perhaps have to shut down, as long as the owners refuse to fall in line with new county rules that outlaw smoking in public places.

Butch Albertson, a Charlie's regular, isn't a smoker himself, but he's amazed it's come to this. "I have been eating with these people for years," he says. "I have a right to come in here, or to leave if I want to if the smoke bothers me. I don't think they have a right to tell people they can't sit in here and have a meal because they smoke."

Tell it to the judge. [hat tip: Sploid]

Comments

[Phil]

People want freedom -from- some choices, and freedom of other choices. They rarely understand how slippery the slope is.

[Kristen Miles]

Anyone who has been to this restaurant would know that it is a family run business in a small town in Indiana. They have plenty of franchised food chains as competition and I applaud them for standing up for their beliefs and not giving in to peer pressure...or the law, whatever.

Ex-smoker, yet still a Charlie's restaurant customer.