Accusations Busybodies: New Puritans Repent!

Consider, for a moment, these twin signs of our scrambled times:

-- In Los Angeles, Jesse Mercado was dismissed from his job as a security guard at the Times despite an excellent performance record. The reason? Mercado was overweight.

-- In Wabash, Ind., Janice Bone lost her job as an assistant payroll clerk at the Ford Meter Box Co. The reason? The firm, which will not let its employees smoke either on the job or at home, insisted that she take a urine test, which proved positive for nicotine.

Welcome, readers, to the prying side of America in the 1990s. The U.S. may still be the land of the free, but increasingly it is also the home of dedicated neo-Puritans, humorlessly imposing on others arbitrary (meaning their own) standards of behavior, health and thought. To a number of concerned observers, the busybodies -- conformity seekers, legal nitpickers and politically correct thought police -- seem to have lost sight of a bedrock American virtue: tolerance, allowing others, in the name of freedom, to do things one disagrees with or does not like, provided they do no outright harm to others.

"There should be limits to what we are prepared to tolerate," says president Stephen Balch of the National Association of Scholars, based in Princeton, N.J., which is dedicated to fighting lockstep leftism in academia. "But in a free society where people are going to get along, those limits have to be pretty wide." Balch is concerned that the very definition of tolerance is changing: more and more people see it as "requiring others to do the kinds of things that they consider enlightened." On many campuses, the prevailing standard these days would appear to be that of Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, a guru for many flower-power youths during the rebellious '60s. In his dense treatise One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse argued that tolerance for the expression of intolerant attitudes, like racial discrimination, should be repressed for society's good.

One key battleground in the tolerance war is life-style. These days, smoking, drinking or noshing on high-cholesterol snacks isn't just a health risk. It can endanger your job as well. Concerned about the ever rising (about 15% annually) cost of health insurance, at least 6,000 U.S. companies, including Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting, refuse to hire smokers, and in some cases fire those who don't beat the habit, even when it is only practiced off the job. For similar insurance reasons, corporate discrimination against the overweight is so widespread that some of the obese have formed a lobbying group called the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.

Meanwhile, corporate busybodies are ingeniously finding new things to ban -- all in the interest, naturally, of slimming health-care costs. One company in Pennsylvania, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, has barred its managers from riding motorcycles: too risky. A Georgia firm has warned its employees to stay away from such life-threatening activities as cliff climbing and surfing.