Dispatches from the Culture Wars brings us a post entitled Sunday Blue Laws Should Be Abolished. Ed Brayton discusses an effort in Wichita, Kansas to allow stores to sell beer on Sunday. A local pastor is opposing it and gets dressed down by Ed for saying:
“It’s a moral issue,” claims Pastor Moore. “It is Sunday. I don’t think that liquor stores should be open on Sunday, because Sunday is a day of worship …. it’s a day of rest.”
Ed points out that this is, in fact, a legal issue. If Pastor Moore and his congregants want to rest on Sunday and not buy beer, nobody is going to hassle them about it. To the contrary, however, Pastor Moore and his congregants really want the state to be obliged to bring its police powers to bear and penalize those who have different opinions on the subject of buying beer on Sundays.
Indiana, of course, has similar laws. They strike me as particularly silly since you can buy beer in a bar or a restaurant on Sundays, you just can’t pick up a 6-pack in the store. For me, it’s more a nuisance than anything else. I’m not normally inclined toward drinking on Sundays in any case and, if I were, planning ahead by picking up enough beer on Saturday eliminates the problem. Still, I have to wonder what actual practical purpose these blue laws serve other than to symbolize obeisance of the government to certain religious preferences.
Agreed. Blue laws are an embarrassment.
In a secular state, where separation of church and state is the rule, then any laws made to single out Sundays as any different from the rest of the days, for special laws, then it is unconstitutional. So too are so-called “Sin-taxes”- taxes on vices, labeled as “sins”.
So too should all zoning laws, differentiating churches and church schools from other businesses- such as locating a carryout within 200 feet of a church; or other laws regarding churches.
I usually deprive Indiana of alcohol revenue, and make a quick beer run to ohio, as do my lake county friends, who hop over to michigan.
then I make sure to litter the roadside (Indiana) with my empty beercans, cardboard beer boxes, and stop on the state line, to urinate, to show my disgust with stupid laws, and protest religious nut-job politicians.
(just kidding on the beer-cans- dont drink and drive.
Not to mention 18 yr olds being able to get killed in Iraq; while “earning money for college”- cant attend of you’re dead- but not being allowed to drink beer legally at their corner veterans club.
And so on.
Can we take the wrangling about “separation of church and state” as read?
I’ve always assumed that Blue Laws have continued due to anti-competitive forces as opposed to anti-sin forces. In other words, the car dealers don’t want to have to work on Sunday, so to keep from getting edged out of sales on those days, they as a group agree not to be open. Same with booze. Otherwise, why would secular holidays be included in the ban on liquor sales? While we’re at it, let’s get rid of the bar closures on election day.
Especially considering it isn’t found anywhere in the Constitution.
Nothing like quoting one singular passage out of a letter written by a Deist former president and suddenly using it as precedent to create laws.
Amen, Brother Doug.
“Checks and Balances” “Three separate but equal branches of government”–these precise words do not appear anywhere in the Constitution, so I suppose that right-wingers like “The Scribe” will deny that these phrases accurately describe aspects of the government that the Constitution establishes. In fact, many right-wingers, with their enthusiastic support of the thinly-disguised reiteration of der Fuhrerprinzep known as the unitary executive theory, apparently don’t believe in these things. Most of us are of course intellectually competent enough to discern that “separation of church and state” is indeed an accurate description of the establishment clause.
Scribe, take a look at Indiana’s Bill of Rights and see if there is not a separation of church and state.
Frankly, there really was not a real separation until the 1940’s. The appellate court have always favored any legislation favoring Protestant Christianity.There is an Indiana Supreme Court case from between 1900 and 1920 upholding a ban on Sunday baseball. Sorry, I cannot recall the citation.
Terry Walsh, I’m not a Bushie so save your not so thinly veiled contempt for someone else. I just am entertained by the twisted logic and hypocrisy of liberals.
One thing I’d point out is that liberals are real good at magically discovering things that don’t exist in the Constitution, like the so-called “right to privacy” for example. Whatever you need to create or stretch to suit you purposes, right?
Most of us who have a brain and don’t march in lockstep with liberalism understand there’s a huge difference between Government establishing an official religion (i.e. Church of England) and outlawing a nativity scene on the lawn of city hall. To state that the establishment clause somehow regulates that is absurd.
Why is it liberals are obsessed with using specific wording in regards to the first amendment (“It only refers to militias, that means the National Guard”), yet believe that they can extract the general meaning of another section and go with that?
Hypocrisy to suit your motives and agenda? Can’t be.
From that comment, I take it you believe that local governments have the authority to endorse a particular religion by displaying that religion’s symbols (e.g. the Christian nativity scene) in a prominent, publicly owned location.
This is an aside, but do you think governments ought to use their authority in this fashion?