DALE McFEATTERS Sunday: no longer a day of rest

WASHINGTON -- If you blinked while scanning the news briefs, you might have missed it.
The Virginia state Legislature, in a fit of absentmindedness, accidentally took a step toward reviving the old-fashioned Sunday. You might think that this would play well in a state with a reputation for being socially conservative -- but you would be wrong.
The alarmed business community went to battle stations to demand a special session of the Legislature to rectify the oversight, and a state judge blocked enforcement of the inadvertently revived "blue law" for 90 days.
And as the old blue laws went, this one wasn't particularly blue. It simply said that an employer couldn't force an employee to work on Sunday or Saturday if that day happened to be the employee's Sabbath.
The outcry over this minor legislative slipup dramatized just how much the role of Sunday has changed in American life.
It is now a pivotal shopping day. Figures assembled by The Washington Post show that Sunday is the best day of the week for grocery, chain and drug stores. It is a big day for dining out and no slouch as a business day for shopping malls. The numbers suggest that if retailers had to pick one day of the week to close it wouldn't be Sunday, it would be Wednesday.
It wasn't always so. Well within the memory of many adults is a time when nothing was open on Sunday, nothing. Stores, restaurants, bars -- virtually all commercial establishments -- were closed on Sunday, and some states deployed gumshoes to enforce the Sunday-closing ordinances, universally known as blue laws.
(Historians have debunked the notion that the names come from the laws having been originally printed on blue paper. "Blue" just seems to be an unusually handy adjective -- blue blood, blue streak, blue moon, etc.)
Bizarre restrictions
Those few convenience stores that did stay open were subject to bizarre restrictions on what they could sell: bread and milk, but not meat and fish. The idea was to ban the Sunday sale of anything that wasn't a necessity, and the blue noses had an expansive idea of what wasn't a necessity -- tools, pots and pans, clothes, furniture, records, silverware. You could buy film but not a camera to put it in.
In this country, the blue laws originated with the Puritans who were determined to build the New Jerusalem in the New World even if they had to lash, maim and mutilate a few of the flock to do it. All activity, except church attendance, was banned on Sunday, and the punishments could be quite severe. George Washington was reputedly arrested once in Connecticut for unnecessarily riding a horse on the Sabbath.
By the time of the Revolutionary War, America had developed a more relaxed attitude to both Sundays and the consumption of alcohol on Sundays -- too relaxed in the opinion of the temperance movement. As it gathered momentum through the 19th century, the movement attacked the sale of beer, wine and liquor by attacking its sale on Sunday.
Eventually, the dries succeeded in banning alcohol consumption altogether from 1918 to 1933. When Prohibition was repealed, the bans on Sunday sales tended to survive. In the past few decades, the laws against selling liquor by the drink on Sunday have largely disappeared. Bans on sales of liquor by the bottle were on the books until quite recently but even they are going by the way.
By coincidence, two days after the judge enjoined the accidental blue law, Sunday liquor sales became legal in Virginia, along with Rhode Island, the latest state to allow them.
In any case, to many big-box retailers the day of the week is irrelevant because they are open around the clock.
But you can still peg a member of a certain generation because before setting out on a weekend shopping trip, they tend to ask, "It's Sunday. Are you sure they're open?"
And if the other person is a member of a new generation, they will reply, "Of course they're open. It's Sunday."
Scripps Howard News Service