Blue Laws
2006-10-20, 9:26 a.m.

I hate blue laws. I think they are completely pointless, arbitrary, and illogical- and not just because I�m an alcoholic. Being from the Midwest, I�ve grown up with blue laws my whole life. For those of you who don�t know what they are, they are laws- usually prohibiting the sale of alcohol on Sundays- specifically passed to legislate morality. In Ohio, grocery stores were not allowed to sell hard liquor. Grocers could sell beer and wine, but to buy hard liquor you would have to go to a different store- a liquor store- to buy vodka, rum, etc etc. More over, on Sundays, you couldn�t buy hard liquor at all. You could still buy beer and wine- so long as it was after 12 noon. �You should be in church on Sunday mornings, damn it- not at the store buying booze! We�re going to make SURE you�re not at home sinning when you should be at church giving your money to us.� And oh yeah- there is no hard liquor sold at all on Sundays- even after 12 noon. As if hard liquor is somehow less moral than beer or wine. So if you go to a bar on Sunday night, you can get start getting hammered whenever you want on beer or wine, and then once midnight rolls around, you can start hitting the really hard stuff. Now that I live in Indiana, it�s even more bizarre. In Indiana, grocery stores can sell beer and wine and hard liquor- there�s no need to go to a liquor store... unless of course you want COLD beer. Grocery stores are not allowed to sell cold beer in Indiana. They can sell beer, just not COLD beer. They can sell vodka, rum, tequila, peach schnapps, white wine, red wine, but not cold beer. Only liquor stores are allowed to sell cold beer. And there is absolutely no alcohol sold on Sundays. You can go to Applebee�s and drink yourself silly, but you can�t buy it in the store and take it home. So now, instead of getting sloshed safely at home, you have to go out to bar or restaurant to do it, and then drive home? That makes LOTS of sense. Of course, all this really accomplishes is to force people into planning ahead a little bit. There have been several times Emily or I have run out to the store on Saturday night because we realized we were about to run out of beer or vodka. And low and behold, if you go into Kroger�s on a Saturday night, just about everyone in the checkout line is stocking up for Sunday. Do the people who passed these laws and the people who have maintained them really think they�re stopping individuals from doing something simply because they make it a little more inconvenient?

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