Going Down to Allen's for a 25 Cent Beer....

Title courtesy of the B-52's, and their song "The Deadbeat Club".

I like beer, and I'm not ashamed of it. Yeah, sometimes I drink wine, occasionally I like a good martini (made with gin please!), or even a gin and tonic. But generally, I like beer. There's nothing more sublime than the hubby and I sitting on our tiny concrete front porch at the end of a long day, and cracking open a nicely chilled Heineken (or Sam Adams, or Corona, or Weistephaner, or Turbo Dog, or insert "Your-beer-choice-is-better-than-my-beer-choice here). We sit, listen to the quiet, and look at the stars. It's wonderful.

But I can't do it on a Sunday, unless I remember to run to Wal-mart by 10 p.m. the previous night.

And that's because of Georgia's laws preventing the sale of alcohol at off-premise locations on Sundays. And to make things even trickier, in Rincon (the largest town closest to me) there are no sales of alcohol on a Sunday, period. Which may explain why there aren't too many chain restaurants in town, at least, any that might want to sell you a beer. On top of that, you can't buy hard liquor ANYWHERE in Effingham County. That's right, if I want gin for my martini, I have to drive over the county line.

I can't really think of a good reason for this. Religious groups in the state have voiced their opposition to Sunday alcohol sales before, and I suppose that's one reason why the law still stands. Unless you ask our governor. The issue came up in the state legislature earlier this year (article from the Atlanta Journal Constitution here )but I don't think the bill ever made it to a vote, because our esteemed Governor, Sonny Perdue, said he'd veto it. His reasoning for this was that people needed to learn "time management skills". Yep, he said that. So, really, my failure to purchase my alcoholic beverage of choice by 10 p.m. Saturday means I need to buy a Day Planner or a PDA.

I can understand if people don't want their clergy member to be falling down drunk on a Sunday morning (there's nothing worse than your pastor accidentally drowning himself in the baptismal font). I can also understand if people don't want congregants showing up to church falling down drunk, either. However, me NOT drinking is not going to encourage me to go to church more. It's just going to make me grouchy, and wonder if I should become a secular humanist. This is really just another law telling me how to live my life in the privacy of my own damn home. Sunday blue laws don't prevent people from drinking. And they won't stop me from driving into Savannah, and having a drink with my dinner, so why do we have them at all?

So, now if y'all will excuse me, I'm going to run to the store and avoid buying the only Canadian beer that gets stocked in this here town: Moosehead.