My recent column on smokers and California's ongoing harassment of them garnered a variety of reader responses ranging from "Your columns reek" to "Your columns are the equivalent of journalistic car wrecks."

Most of the responses were not so succinct. But each expressed outrage over my stand that government efforts throughout California to ban smoking in public parks -- one of the last places outside their own homes where smokers may indulge their habit -- is a violation of personal freedom.

Let me stipulate, again, that I deplore smoking and am thankful there are few in my family, social or professional circles who smoke.

That being said, the real issues here are the ordinances levied by local, state and federal governing bodies on behaviors they deem undesirable and the knee-jerk support of absolutely any such ordinance or sin tax against Big Tobacco.

The knee-jerkers must just adore the latest volley, this one coming out of both houses of Congress to fund kids' health care.

Early last month, Sen. Ted Kennedy announced a proposal to increase the federal cigarette tax from 39 cents to a dollar per pack -- that's a 156 percent increase -- to fund the State Children's Health Insurance program.

Considering the rampant obesity among America's children, one might think a tax against Ding Dongs and Twinkies would make more sense, but such a proposal might strike too close to home for the good senator.

The House version of the bill is a whopper, too, adding 45 cents in taxes for an increase of 115 percent.

And you cigar smokers? Forget about it. You guys (and a few gals I know) don't even inhale, yet you can expect to pay about $1 more for each premium stogie you smoke.

It's all good, though, because smokers are bad and deserve to bear the brunt of funding health care for poor children. Right?

Wrong, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis, which reports that sin taxes on cigarettes and alcohol "disproportionately burden the poor" who tend to spend more of their incomes on their sins than higher-income earners do.

The NCPA found that high school dropouts who smoke, for example, spend three to four times as much of their income on tobacco products as professionals who smoke.

Which means "the burden of the proposed cigarette tax hike on the lowest-earning 20 percent of households is 37 times heavier than it would be if the government raised the money with the federal income tax," according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan group.

So, instead of merely punishing naughty smokers, the proposed tax will hurt the poor and, ironically enough, create a health care system that's dependent on smokers continuing to smoke.

The nonsmoking readers I heard from last week told me they have zero tolerance for smokers, even those puffing away in a park, away from the madding crowds, under a wide-open sky.

And if they don't like it, one reader said, it's their own fault.

"If they (smokers) didn't keep keeling over from lung cancer and emphysema, maybe they'd be a bigger voting bloc in California city councils," she wrote.

True. But when they're gone, who will be left to pick up health-care tax tab? Which sinners will be next?