Hoosiers for Beverage Choices is pressing for a change in Indiana’s laws that restrict alcohol sales on Sundays.

The goal of HBC is to update Indiana law to allow for:

1) The carry-out sale of alcoholic beverages on Sundays; and
2) The sale of cold beer at drug, grocery and convenience stores.

To paraphrase Lionel Hutz, “I don’t use the word ‘hero’ very often, but HBC is the greatest hero in American history.”

The Sunday alcohol thing is mystifying. If you want to buy beer on Sunday, you have to drive to a bar or restaurant. Yeah, I know, with a little planning, I can buy beer on Saturday and have some on Sunday. But I’m not “a very good planner.”

IC 7.1-3-1-14 establishes the legal time for sales. It’s legal to sell alcohol Monday through Saturday from 7 a.m. to 3 a.m. (prevailing local time). On Sundays you can’t sell from 3 a.m. through the following Monday at 7 a.m.

Browsing through these statutes, I see that the whole crazy thing needs to be thrown in the trash and written from scratch. (For example, the following section advises us that it is legal to sell to someone who is sitting or standing and that it’s legal to drink while sitting or standing. Mighty liberal of them.) Reminds me of the fireworks statutes that were presumably written to be deliberately confusing for the benefit of particular constituencies. And I don’t say this gratuitously — by and large, the Indiana Code is written as directly as possible. But, there are certainly pockets that remain obstinately tangled. (Title 3 – Election Law also comes to mind.)