North Carolina Continues Its Slow Crawl Out of the 19th Century:
Laws Mandating Domestic Sexual Segregation for Unmarried Couples Overturned
Johnny Quest and I have been happily living in sin now for several years, breaking laws in both NC and VA. Now, about half of Chapel Hill is breaking these laws anyway, and only a complete Neanderthal moron would even think about enforcing such patently unconstitutional, crazy, and immoral laws. But leave it to a Pender County Sheriff (Carson Smith) to try. He got slapped down in court, and the law has been overturned--201 years too late--but no legal action can be taken against him. After all, there's no law against being an ignorant pigshit, nor for trying to enforce dumbass laws. Dumbassedness, however, is its own punishment.
Laws Mandating Domestic Sexual Segregation for Unmarried Couples Overturned
Johnny Quest and I have been happily living in sin now for several years, breaking laws in both NC and VA. Now, about half of Chapel Hill is breaking these laws anyway, and only a complete Neanderthal moron would even think about enforcing such patently unconstitutional, crazy, and immoral laws. But leave it to a Pender County Sheriff (Carson Smith) to try. He got slapped down in court, and the law has been overturned--201 years too late--but no legal action can be taken against him. After all, there's no law against being an ignorant pigshit, nor for trying to enforce dumbass laws. Dumbassedness, however, is its own punishment.
posted by Winston Smith at
1:55 PM
6 Comments:
From what I understand, these laws and many like them originated certainly in part in "morality," but also to protect women, who were economically far more vulnerable in the olden days, against the cads who would dump them and presumably a few children, when they got tired of the whole (non-)deal.
Of course things are much better for women now, and so these laws are superfluous.
Mostly.
(Not to defend the cementhead sheriff here, who was nowhere near trying to preserve the antiquated "good" such laws tried to embody.)
Interesting...though it sounds like a cover story to me. Concern for women is often a stalking horse to achieve puritan goals.
Still, maybe...
If puritan goals are in conflict with natural law, which some of us believe has full expression in reality, they seldom survive a generation or two.
I will say that while I grew up in Pennsylvania, the "Blue Laws" were still in effect, which forced the closing of most businesses on Sundays.
Eventually, New Jersey got rid of theirs, and so we would happily venture over the bridge for the forbidden pleasures of Wal-Mart style shopping at King's department store.
Capitalism and free markets won out, and Pennsylvania discarded its Blue Laws, but I must wonder whether that was a good thing. Blue Laws gave all employees a day of rest without compromising their employers' competitive advantage. Everyone had the same rules.
Jesus, when condemned for healing the sick on the Sabbath, noted that you pull your ox out of the pit if he falls in on that day, but otherwise, the Sabbath was made for man, not as worship or for God's Divine Command pleasure.
Man needs a day off, once a week, every week. It's good for him. CS Peirce thought it was good for man to muse about the Bigger Things every day; the Bible just packed it all into one.
Just a musing, WS, not an evangelical exercise. I favor laws that truly protect man, and especially in the above case as I've postulated it, woman and child, against the cold hard wheel of man's (the male of the species') nature.
(You might enjoy Aquinas on both human rights and the concept of a "just wage." Pretty liberal for a papist in the 13th century. There's hope for me yet.)
Interesting. Could be true, but I have my doubts. Puritans often use the protection of women or families as a stalking horse to push their agenda.
I'm not a puritan, WS. I have done most if not all of the things you have.
I like the idea of a man not being able to discard the consequences of his dilettantisms in manhood. I'm a feminist, man.
In the olden days, there were no blood tests or WICs, only shotguns. Men suck.
Sorry, that second 'puritan' post was a mistake because the first one didn't show up for awhile.
I'm all about the weekend, man. But it's the labor movement that brought us that, not Christianity.
Problem with blue laws is that they don't seem to pass the Lemmon Test. They're not an arbitrarily-selected day off, but, rather, a day off carefully selected to promote one particular religion.
You'll have to forgive me...I've been being pestered by a fundamentalist student of mine who, after 5 years of patient discussion, is still every bit as bone-headed, ignorant, and dogmatic as he was five years ago. So I'm particularly irritable on the subject of Christianity myself these days...
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