ShareThisSome 30 years ago, I sensed change was in the air when my then-brother-in-law, vice president of a major tobacco company, stopped smoking. I quickly followed suit.Since that time, I have not once heard tobacco use condemned from an American pulpit. Smokers are now vilified by believers and unbelievers alike. Tobacco use has become the great secular sin of our time. These days, in the rain and chill, smokers must huddle on the sidewalks outside their workplaces, because their habit is prohibited indoors. As yet, alas, no technology exists to remove cigarettes from the fingers of the glamorous stars of the old black-and-white movies, who, surrounded by halos of smoke, lacked our contemporary sense of sin.There are, to be sure, fashions in sin. Understandably, ministers and priests are disinclined to preach against these fashions, but we could do with a little guidance. When the AIDS epidemic struck, a few muffled church voices suggested it to be a moral crisis easily cured by curbing promiscuity.They were shouted down by a secular chorus that pronounced AIDS to be a public health problem that demanded medication, not a change in behavior.Despite a decline in AIDS deaths due to new and expensive therapies, the spread of the underlying HIV virus continues virtually unabated in the United States. AIDS victims have become objects of compassion, not condemnation (that is, unless they are also caught smoking in public places).The failure of Prohibition prompted my home state to confine liquor sales to government-run stores and to apply a "sin tax" on every bottle. If the state seriously wanted to reduce smoking among teen-agers, it would confine tobacco sales to the same stores.Most politicians outside the tobacco-growing states have decided that smoking (unlike moderate drinking) is totally sinful. Shrinking from the obvious (banning tobacco altogether), they are determined to fine its producers billions of dollars.Our current sin of fashion is obesity. Under pressure, food processors have produced "lite" brands, but they (like reduced tar and nicotine) don't solve the underlying behavioral problem, which is overeating.Recently it was revealed that one of every four American teen-age girls currently suffers from one or more sexually transmitted diseases. That is not a fashion, but a health problem that can be ameliorated only by a radical change in behavior.X...X...XCorrection: In a recent column on prescription drug abuse, the word "serotonin" was misspelled. And the antidepressant Cymbalta, while similar to Effexor, was developed independently.(David Yount's Growing in Faith: A Guide for the Reluctant Christian (Seabury) is in a new edition. He answers readers at P.O.Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22195 and dyount(at)erols.com)??
Fashions in sin
Paying taxes unites us. It also divides us. People can pay five and even six times more in state and local taxes than other folks in similar circumstances making similar incomes.
Who's got your number?
In one of the fastest-growing forms of identity theft, crooks are stealing tax refunds by swiping personal information and using it to trick the Internal Revenue Service.
