By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

Not long ago, it was illegal in many parts of Georgia to open a store or restaurant on Sunday.

Now Sunday brunch is many a restaurant's most profitable offering, and it's the churched, not the unchurched, who make it so.

Times change.

Times changed recently when the state government, which outlaws gambling in order to protect us from ourselves, set up its own gambling operation. One must assume that the state is still interested in protecting us from ourselves, because gambling is still illegal.

But we also must assume that the state views the dangers from gambling differently when it is the state and not some enterprising entrepreneur who is reaping the profit.

Oh, and gambling for charity also is now legal.

The argument against legalizing gambling in the state has always been that it will destroy our society as so many become addicted and indebt themselves beyond their capacity to pay.

But it appears that we don't care what happens to the gambler as long as the money is going to the state for education or to some charity.

I don't know if I can even begin to unravel the philosophy behind such a hypocritical farce as a state lottery in a state in which gambling is illegal.

Let's see... if the state reaps billions, many millions of that going to the company owned by the governor's special friends who somehow got the state contract to run the lottery, that's good. If some convenience store owner makes a few extra bucks paying $10 or $20 to people who enjoy putting twice as much money into his card-playing computers, that's bad.

I know some local business owners wound up in the news recently when they were arrested for paying off on computerized card games, and I want you to understand with crystal clarity that I do not assign any fault to the police who made those arrests. Police are sworn to uphold whatever laws are passed by the folks we send to the state legislature or put on the local councils and commissions.

When they do that, they deserve nothing but praise.

What we're discussing here is our whole way of thinking as a society.

I'm not even necessarily advocating legalized gambling. I'm advocating integrity and consistency in our blue laws.

One used to hear that phrase, “blue laws,” often, but it seems to have dropped out of use lately. Its most narrow definition, according to Webster, is “any law that forbids certain practices, as doing business or dancing, on Sunday,” or more broadly as “any of the puritanical laws of colonial New England regarding personal conduct.

We have a bunch of blue laws in Georgia. You can drink alcohol anytime, anywhere, but you can't buy it after midnight or on Sunday, except in a restaurant. Well, that depends on what town you're in. There are a few counties in the state that are still completely dry, and still others that allow neither packaged nor poured alcohol sales on Sunday, and still others, like Fayetteville, that choose your poison for you by prohibiting liquor but allowing beer and wine.

And some towns cut you off at 11 or 11:30 p.m. so there's no chance someone will accidentally make the buy at 12:01 because of a faulty clock.

Ridiculous. If we think it's necessary to govern what an individual chooses to take into his or her body, why is it less necessary at 2 p.m. than at 1 a.m.?

By what method have we determined that people should be free to consume alcohol but not marijuana? Both are horrifyingly dangerous drugs if abused, yet we spend money to build prison cells for people caught with a few pot seeds in their car ashtrays, while thousands yearly drink themselves to death having never once darkened a jail door.

Well, they've never darkened a jail door as long as they didn't try to buy any of the stuff on Sunday, anyway.

Tell me what you think, folks. Should we as individual people be free to make our own choices, or not? If not, then who gets to decide which choices we're free to make and which are to be made by the state, and what are the qualifications these overseers of our morals must have?

And what are the criteria for filling in the following blank? “Freedom is a good thing, except ______.”

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