“Do you even vape?” the world seemed to ask of California Rep. Duncan Hunter this week. “Yes,” the Republican congressman responded with gusto. “I vape.”

Hunter, like so many Americans, knows that though the moral cloud of vaporized e-juice is long, it billows softly toward justice. Hunter knows that four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men might put into their lungs whatever they choose. Hunter knows that the only thing we have to vape is vape itself.

He brought all of this knowledge to bear in a letter sent Monday to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who seeks to quash the rights of vapers everywhere. The Hill reports:

“Yes, I vape — as do millions of other Americans,” Hunter wrote in a letter to Pelosi. “And why do I vape? It is because it prevents me from smoking the real thing.” “E-cigarettes are a suitable alternative to cigarettes, and they could very well save my life, as well as the lives of so many Americans who are making their best effort to quit cigarettes,” Hunter wrote.

Say it with me, and keep saying it until your oppressors are shouted down and cowering. “Yes I vape.” Yes I vape. Yes I vape.

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

