It was only in 1968 that Virginia permitted localities to authorize the sale of liquor by the drink at bars and restaurants. Before that, one had to drink at home or join a “private club” that allowed one to bring one’s own bottle in a brown bag.
Drunch, dude. Drunk brunch.
Pity me. I live in a state that has no alcohol sales on Sunday, period.
I’m sure the noon sales on Sunday restriction was to encourage church attendance. Now stores can sell liquor on Sunday mornings, IF they buy an “extended liquor license” that allows this. Rather than simply raise the price of a liquor license, and thus encourage future political opponents to count this as a tax increase, they made it an optional add-on to a liquor license.
I also live in Michigan. This may be apocryphal, but I’ve heard the reason there are no alcohol sales after 2 am in Michigan is due to Henry Ford, who didn’t want his auto workers getting too drunk and staying up too late.
To you and others that have asked the same question, I’m not in any way defending specific hour/day restrictions. There’s no question that things like no-Sunday or no-Sunday-morning sales are old blue laws and nothing more.
I was referencing, and very mildly calling BS on your more general comment that “That’s not how freedom works.” Restrictions on alcohol sales from “closing time” until dawn likely save many lives, in direct and indirect ways, and are no more an impingement on “freedom” than speed limits. IMVHO.
Blue laws, though? Fuck 'em.
Government control of an industry. While some forms of high-state big-S socialism include such control, this option by some states is not equivalent to “socialism” any more than is setting local speed limits.
Call it the same very mild calling-BS on an overused, rarely-understood term.
California seems to be relatively sane in this department. No liquor sales between 2am and 6am, 7 days a week. Alcohol is available pretty much everywhere, including gas stations, grocery stores, and restaurants. There are no state-owned or -run liquor stores.
There’s nothing magical about Sunday; it’s just as good as any other day of the week for a break from booze. As others have said, with 24/7 booze sales the party just keeps on going leading to potentially disastrous results. With breaks in the service time (at night, all day Sunday/Sunday morning) it forces most people to go home and sober up.
Why Sunday and not some other day? History and tradition largely from religion. But as the Supreme Court has held, the secular purposes in a day of rest make Sunday a permissible day off from work and/or liquor sales.
Government control of an industry is commonplace. Government ownership of an industry is not.
In these states, Gov’t owns all warehousing and retail distribution of alcohol. It is not the normal “capitalist” response to an industry that needs oversight.
Let’s put it this way, if every retailer in the state operated under the system used for alcohol, would you consider that big S socialism? Every retail item you want must, by law, be purchased directly from the government, who will also decide what products will appear on the shelves, and at what price.
If you think that’s Socialism, then so is the alcohol market, it’s just very specific in scope.
Yes, that’s what I lived with until recently and while it may be a case of the familiar seeming right, I don’t know of any significant opposition to, or chafing under, CA’s rules. Very liberal but not unlimited.
BTW, my immediate model for government-run liquor system is New Hampshire. You know, “Live Free or Die” New Hampshire? The “fuck off and leave us alone” Texas of New England? (Okay, maybe Vermont is Texas, but NH is at least NM/AZ.) If it’s good enough for Granitefaces, y’know…
ETA: And the biggest stores are on the Interstates, with their own on and off ramps (really!) So it’s about as far from Socialism as you can get - it’s the government cornering a very profitable retail industry as a revenue base. Governmental capitalism at its shiniest.
Pretty much exactly the same here, although there are a few municipal liquor stores and our no sales hours are 2am to 7am. In the current legislative session (which ends Friday, thank god), someone introduced a bill to get 24 hour liquor sales in Deadwood, but it was defeated mostly because it wasn’t fair to the rest of the state.
Can you provide any sites that limiting Sunday morning liquour sales, or an other day of the week’s morning sales, has a positive effect on public life?
Jews don’t recognize Jesus as the son of God.
Protestants don’t recognize the authority of the Pope as the Vicar of Christ
Baptists don’t recognize each other standing in line to pay the cashier in liquor stores.
DOES any state have unlimited liquor laws (freely licensed sellers, no hour or day restrictions, minimal location restrictions etc.)?
There aren’t any unless you’re a devout Christian of a sect that’s agin alcohol.
I don’t think he’s saying that’s the case, nor am I. He’s explaining the why, up to the justifications of the SCOTUS, which all still really boil down to (1) blue laws and (2) liquor sales on Sunday mornings would probably be <1% of the total in any case, so no one much cares.
You can be sure that if frat parties decided to start at 9 am on Sundays, the laws would fall.
It’s just a name. We still had slaves when it was penned, so I think we can safely say it’s aspirational.
Many years ago I lived on a busy street above a bar in Ketchikan Alaska. At 5:00 a.m. the bars would close and everyone would hang out on the street (below my window) until 6:00 a.m. when the bars opened again. Good times.
Not so much. The social fraternity as we know it is a dying institution. The largest fraternities (including mine) now have dry houses, and the cost of insurance all but guarantees that the others will in less than 10 years.
Many folks are unaware that it was the Department of Transportation that raised the minimum drinking age to 21.
More likely so that the good folks who were going to church early on Sunday morning didn’t encounter drunks staggering around at the same hour at the end of their Saturday night.
Recall that liquor consumption in the US was once far higher than it is now, reaching almost four gallons per capita in the 1820s, compared to about 2.2 at present. Some blue laws, especially in the east, may have originated during the temperance movements of the next decade.
Technically, it was the 50 state legislatures. The Department of Transportation merely provided a carrot in the form of highway funds (or more accurately, threatened to withdraw highway funds from states which didn’t comply.)