Editorial
Macon Telegraph

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 deficits 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 implicitly understands is a 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.

— Dusty Nix, for the editorial board