Published: February 21, 2009 10:22 pm         

STEPHANIE SALTER: The Indiana Legislature giveth, the Indiana Legislature taketh away

BLOOMINGTON — Last week, the current session of the General Assembly reached its midpoint, when legislation must be exchanged between chambers. A proverbial flurry of bills and resolutions swirled inside the Statehouse.

In the plus column, one of the dumbest pieces of pending legislation swirled right out a Senate side door.

In the negative column, a bill that deserved much better got its guts sucked out and sent swirling down a House bathroom drain.

First the good news.

Senate Joint Resolution 15 proposed consideration of an amendment to Indiana’s Constitution, a serious move that requires two consecutive passages by the Senate and House, as well as a statewide voter referendum.

The burning issue? To ban same-gender marriages by inserting a “man-woman-only” definition of marriage in the state’s fundamental governing document.

Hey, you might say, I thought it already was illegal in Indiana for gays and lesbians to marry.

Hey, you would be right.

But a passel of state senators and reps see secular marriage of homosexual couples as a threat right up there with al Qaida. They are not about to rely on existing legal statutes. The definition of state-sanctioned “marriage” that they hear from church pulpits is the definition they want to stamp into the Constitution.

Four times since 2004 the Senate has passed such a resolution to no avail. Remarkably, this year’s version was stopped by a surprising source in the GOP-dominated chamber: The Senate Republican Caucus voted against offering the proposed amendment for consideration.

While Democrats are not without gay marriage foes among their ranks, monkeying with state constitutions tends to be more of a Republican thing. In the Democrat-controlled House, according to majority leader Pat Bauer, there is little traction for like measures that have been introduced.

Randy Studt, vice president of Indiana Equality Action, was gracious in semi-victory. His Hoosier cohorts had joined national gay rights groups to block the resolution.

In a news release, Studt said, “Indiana Equality is glad to see that the Senate has finally decided this issue is unworthy of their time, after passing a similar measure on four occasions.”

The flip side of the derailed marriage amendment was the sorry remnant of House Bill 1213 that was offered for a vote, and passed by a huge bipartisan majority.

Not long ago, HB 1213 looked like a much-overdue smoking ban in almost all enclosed spaces in which Hoosiers work, eat, drink, gamble, play and hang around. The most significant inclusions would have been restaurants, bars and casinos.

By the time various industry lobbyists were done, however, 1213 looked like Exemption City. Any bar, night club or restaurant that serves alcohol or doesn’t employ or serve people under the age of 18 gets a pass on the smoking prohibition.

Eighty percent of space inside casinos also can be thick with smoke, as can family-owned and operated businesses in which all employees are relatives.

How bad is the bill?

The version that passed the House is so bad, it was opposed by anti-smoking groups such as the Indiana Campaign for Smokefree Air.

Accustomed to accepting watered-down legislation over no legislation at all, these anti-smoking activists recognized several amendments to the bill as worse than useless — they saw them as downright dangerous.

For example, one of the most pernicious changes made to the original bill is a deadline placed on any Indiana community that might want to enact more enlightened smoking regulations than the state’s. If a local entity plans that sort of move — thereby joining such cities as West Lafayette, Bloomington, Fort Wayne and Greencastle — HB 1213 says it must be done by the end of this year.

One of the goals of a uniform workplace smoking ban was to make competition among bars, restaurants and casinos more fair. Rather than pit businesses that operate in a county or city with strong smoking prohibitions against businesses in nearby municipalities that have poor or no regulations, everyone would play by the same rules. Healthy rules.

But the opposite occurred as HB 1213 was whacked into impotence.

Some two dozen states already have banned smoking from all workplaces. Contrary to financial data from these trailblazers, Indiana restaurant, bar and casino owners insisted they would suffer great financial losses or be driven out of business by a real ban.

Meanwhile, cigarette-addicted citizens who refuse to admit that public smoking is a worker safety issue, joined in with their usual cry about Big Brother trying to run people’s lives.

Brad Klopfenstein, executive director of the Indiana Licensed Beverage Association, probably best summed up the anti-ban group view. In an Indianapolis Star story by Shari Rudavsky, Klopfenstein said of HR 1213, “We’d like to just see it go away and let the free market take care of things.”

That’s the free market that says, if you don’t want to expose yourself to cancer, emphysema and heart disease from second-hand smoke, then just don’t work in a bar, casino or restaurant that caters to adults in Indiana.

Groups such as Indiana Campaign for Smokefree Air now turn their attention to the Senate. Their best hope is for that chamber to restore in its version what was taken out of HR 1213. If that fails, the least the Senate can do is defeat a pretend public smoking ban that will only set back the fight to protect Hoosier workers.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.