"Smoking isn't bad for you, because the Bible says so!"

And Hitler was anti-smoking, too!



#1602: Lynda R. Farley

Ok, so this one is probably not a very influential figure, but Lynda R. Farley is so colorful that we can’t just let her be. Farley drew a bit of attention to herself when she was part of a “million” veterans marching on Washington DC (more like a few hundred) to protest Obama in 2013, presenting herself as the “Smoker on Strike” with messages like “George Washington, father of our country & a smoker!” and “the person who first promoted the lie that ‘smoking causes lung cancer’ was Adolf Hitler” (not entirely accurate, but that’s not the main problem with the message), presented in … unusual combinations of colors, fonts and capitalizations – nothing compared to her website, though, which is absolutely amazing (she calls it “the most beautiful pages on the WWW,” and it is hard not to conclude that she really is unable to distinguish between “I say so” and “it is the case”). Even her website cannot compare to her car, the “liberty van” (do look it up), however.



As for the message: Yes, Lynda Farley is a denialist about the negative health effects of smoking. The most important line of argument (it seems) is that she “personally believe every word in the King James Bible. ‘Thou shalt not smoke’ is NOT in there. And, the verses usually quoted about holiness, and the body being God’s temple nowhere refer to smoking or not smoking,” which is probably correct. Meanwhile, she rejects “the anti-smoker’s junk science. And there’s GOOD EVIDENCE that they LIE about the ‘risks’, or at the very least, exaggerate greatly.”

http://americanloons.blogspot.ca/2016/02/1602-lynda-r-farley.html