Take Your Boobs Out, Put Your Butts Out

Let’s be honest it is only smokers, and then generally smokers in the dead of winter, who seem to complain that bars and restaurants across the bay state no longer permit smoking. In April it was reported that not only had the toxicity in restaurant air gone down, but business had actually increased. With smoking banished from the indoors in almost any public place, it seemed that smoking was now only acceptable (but you should quit already) at home and while huddled around outdoor ashtrays. One more victory for the anti-carcinogens crusade pushed a couple from their rental in South Boston. After receiving complaints from other tenants in the building, the landlord evicted the couple for smoking, due not to an anti-smoking clause in their lease but the phrase: "any nuisance; any offensive noise, odor or fumes; or any hazard to health." Take that, Philip-Morris.

Now that there is precedent for evicting smokers even when smoking is permitted, the tide of pushing out all things offensive has turned. Or has it? Rep. David Linsky of Natick has proposed legislation that says, "show me your tits." According to a Daily News quote from Evelyn Reilly, of The Massachusetts Family Institute, "The bills in question are so broad that they would not protect the public from an exhibitionist who wished to go bare-breasted by claiming she is a nursing mother." Linsky has presented the state’s Legislative joint Judiciary Council with a bill supported by breastfeeding mothers. The bill would levy a fine of $300 on anyone who infringed on a mother’s right to breastfeed her child in any public place. Bostonist has never found public breastfeeding to be an offensive practice but our grandmother certainly would be appalled. Grandma should have heard Mr. Linsky prove his point ever so eloquently with this statement: "When you have to feed the crying infant, you have to feed the crying infant, you can't wait." Take that, Nestle.