When Chemists Attack

The State had an article today about a proposal to exempt all counties from South Carolina’s ridiculous “blue laws”.

The House and Senate this week voted to exempt each of the state’s counties from the century-old law. Under the blue laws, apparel sales, for instance, cannot begin until 1:30 p.m. on Sundays.

For those of you who don’t live in South Carolina, we have laws that state that certain stores can’t be opened until an couple of hours after church services end on Sunday. Some stores open, but they’re restricted to what items they can sell until after church is over. The local Wal-Mart, for instance, opens at a normal time on Sunday, but ropes off the vast majority of the store – which contains the items you’re not allowed to buy until Sunday afternoon.

Some counties – the ones who collect enough taxes from tourism – are exempt from the blue laws.

Six counties now earn enough motel tax revenue to skip the blue law restrictions — Horry [the Myrtle Beach area], Charleston, Georgetown, Beaufort, Greenville and Richland.

The tourism exemption is comical. It’s as if South Carolina is trying to hide its bass-ackwardsness from the rest of the country.

the bad news about this new proposal to exempt all counties from the blue laws? It’s only for one year, because nobody in the Legislature appears to have the guts to get rid of these idiotic laws permanently. Heck, some of them don’t even want to scrap them for a year:

“My personal belief is I think we should respect Christianity more and during the hours when the church is open, let’s keep the shops closed,” said Rep. Bob Leach, R-Greer. “I didn’t know it was in there.”

Are the churches really frightened that people, if given the choice to attend church or go buy a new Wii game from the local Gamestop, will stop going to church? No, don’t answer that. 🙂