The following editorial appeared Tuesday in the Longview Daily News.

It probably shouldn’t surprise us that several Washington lawmakers arrived at the start of the 2006 session Monday with bills aimed at undoing the state’s one-month-old smoking ban.

Some business interests were claiming a hardship even before the ban took effect, on Dec. 8. But one bill seeking to add a religious exemption to the new law is somewhat surprising. Even sponsors of the ban failed to see that argument coming.

Sen. Debbie Regala, D-Tacoma, authored the legislation after hearing the concerns of a Native American constituent who uses smoke at weddings, funerals and healing ceremonies. Legislative leaders indicate that Regala’s proposed religious exemption will get a hearing before the Senate Health and Long-Term Care Committee.

It should. The constituent who brought this issue to Regala’s attention, Storm Reyes, is surely correct in claiming that Washington voters never intended to ban the use of smoke in religious ceremonies. If carefully written, an exemption for the sacramental use of tobacco ought not do great damage to the law.

The same, however, cannot be said of another change proposed by Rep. Bill Grant, D-Walla Walla. Grant’s bill would allow businesses that can show a 10 percent loss of income stemming from the smoking ban to pay a $250 fee to be exempt from the law.

It’s far too early to be considering this sort of loosening of the state’s smoking ban. The law is just a little over a month old. That’s not nearly long enough to know what impact the law may have on small businesses in the hospitality and gambling industries.

Indeed, the evidence suggests that the impact will be mostly positive. In New York City, bar and restaurant employment and tax receipts rose in the year following New York’s enactment of a ban on smoking in all public places. Approximately 80 percent of Washingtonians are nonsmokers. Many of them who have stayed away from smoke-filled taverns and the like can be expected to start frequenting those businesses. That’s been the result in New York, California and six other states with smoking bans.

In any event, 63 percent of Washington voters said last fall that they shouldn’t be made to risk the life-threatening consequences of breathing secondhand smoke. Lawmakers should think long and hard before tinkering with the statute those voters approved to avoid that risk.