Bags against humanity?

A city councilman in Baltimore, Md., recently equated using plastic bags with the Nazi holocaust, and The Baltimore Examiner newspaper took him to task for the hyperbole in a May 1 editorial.

Having your heart in the right place is a nice quality. But it often makes for bad public policy, and in the case of Baltimore City Councilman James Kraft, D-1, the practice of putting his emotions first seems to have displaced his head.

He equated using plastic bags with Nazi extermination tactics at a City Council meeting earlier this week.

“We don’t want to be criticized by future generations for not doing enough now as were those who dealt with the Germans then,” Kraft said.

So what follows? Should those who use plastic bags be charged with murder? Genocide?

The editorial goes on to suggest that instead of trying to ban plastic bags, Kraft try less drastic measures to improve the environment, such as asking the city of Baltimore to stop buying bottled water, requiring city employees to pay for their own parking to encourage them to use public transportation, and doing more to encourage plastic bag recycling.