I made the mistake today of posting to the Plastic thread discussing the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act that is making its way through Congress.  One of my posts was marked “irrelevant,” which I find somewhat amusing considering the contents of other posts, and the other has not (yet?) been moderated.  Both were throwaway comments, but I should know better than to post to a place like Plastic.  Especially in an offhand manner.  The worst thing about it is that once I invest enough mental and emotional energy to read and post on a thread, I find it difficult to let the conversation go without trying to have the last word.  That poor decision aside…

The PRFCA is one of the silliest pieces of proposed legislation I’ve seen in a while.  Well, okay, perhaps the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment is sillier, but we’ll leave that for another day.  The PRFCA, in its present form, proposes to prevent food and non-alcoholic beverage companies from being subject to civil liabilities unless it can be shown that the product in question was not in compliance with statutory and regulatory requirements at the time of the sale.   That somebody (several somebodies, from the looks of it) thought this needed to be specifically stated in a law says volumes about the state of our courts and our legislators’ priorities.  If courts are screwed up enough to allow the kinds of lawsuits this bill is intended to prevent (i.e. “McDonald’s made me fat”), what makes the authors think that the courts won’t just overturn their piddling little law?  If enacted, this law would be just an insignificant speed bump in a road that should never have been paved.  Heck, it shouldn’t even be a footpath.