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Editorial
Columbus Ledger

Seth Harp has been trying to get some common sense into Georgia liquor laws for a long time. It’s been a losing battle thus far, but you can’t say the state senator from Midland gives up easily.

Harp will try again in the 2009 session of the General Assembly to get a law passed which allows stores to do what restaurants have been doing already for years – sell alcoholic beverages on Sundays. There’s an economic argument now in addition to the issues of practicality and fairness: A state facing massive budgetary woes could use the revenue, especially the kind that would come in from “border” communities where people just have to drive across a nearby state line to buy their beverages – and spend their tax money – elsewhere.

Sunday liquor laws in Georgia are nothing short of nonsensical: On-premise consumption is legal, while purchasing beer, wine or spirits for consumption elsewhere is not. You can get snockered at a public place and then get behind the wheel; what you can’t do on Sunday in Georgia is drive sober to a store, purchase the adult beverage of your choice and drink it in the relative safety — yours and everyone else’s — of your own home.

The state Christian Coalition leader’s comparison of Harp’s proposal to legalized prostitution is absurd. Retail sale of alcoholic beverages, unlike prostitution, is lawful already; it is banned on Sunday by a law everybody understands is an implicit religious prohibition on the population at large.

“Blue laws” have never really made much sense, and Georgia’s peculiar version of them makes none whatever.

Babies’ best friend

The Columbus area parents — and, of course, their children — who have benefited from the skills and professional comfort of Dr. Louis Levy would fill many a large room. Now the Medical Center’s director of newborn services has been rightly recognized for his outstanding career with the Georgia Hospital Heroes Lifetime Achievement Award.

Besides being one of the first neonatal specialists in Georgia, Levy has been a tireless public advocate for medicine’s smallest and most vulnerable patients – he has been the voice for those who could only cry. As a 1974 appointee to the Governor's Council for Maternal and Infant Health, Levy helped draw up statewide hospital nursery standards, and he earns much of the credit for the establishment of regional perinatal centers like the one at The Medical Center, where he has practiced since 1972.

This recognition is a fitting tribute to a fine career. The families who owe so much to Dr. Levy’s care are an even better one.

— Dusty Nix, for the editorial board