Guest Post by Morbo
And now an update from Croatia: Shopping on Sundays has been banned – kind of.
Croatia is 90 percent Roman Catholic, and the country’s clerical hierarchy has been moaning for some time about the trend of people spending Sundays in shopping malls instead of churches. A new law will go into effect Jan. 1 requiring most shops to close.
But there are always exceptions. The Associated Press reported that Sunday shopping will still be allowed during the summer and around Christmas.
The law also allows stores in gas, bus and train stations to open on Sundays year-round, along with those in hospitals. Bakeries, newsstands and flower shops are also exempt from the ban.
We used to have these dumb Sunday-closing laws in the many parts of the United States. They are called “blue laws,” and remnants of them still exist. In my area of the country, for example, all of the malls are open on Sunday, but most car dealerships are closed. My wife attended grad school in North Carolina in the 1980s and noted that you could not buy wine on Sunday until after 12 p.m.
But laws requiring malls, big box stores, groceries and other retail establishments to close on Sundays are pretty much kaput these days. What happened to them? I once heard TV preacher Pat Robertson accuse the Supreme Court of doing in blue laws, but Robertson, as usual, was wrong. Blue laws should have been blasted out of existence by the Supreme Court as a violation of church-state separation, but it didn’t happen. The Supreme Court actually upheld Sunday-closing laws in a 1961 case called McGowan v. Maryland.
The court majority held that blue laws might have once had a religious purpose but have since become secular, merely providing a day of rest for some people. Lame. What if your day of rest is not Sunday? What if you don’t need or want a day of rest? The court blithely glossed over these questions.
Despite the boost from the high court, blue laws died a natural death.
Two things did them in: one, shopkeepers soon learned that people wanted to shop on Sundays and pressured state legislatures to repeal the laws so they could make more money. Government, eager to increase its tax revenues, said OK. Two, blue laws were unenforceable.
Think about it. A total ban on buying and selling on Sunday is impossible. Restaurants need to be open for tourists and travelers. People need to buy gas, the Sunday paper, medicine or other items. Exemptions are always carved out, and at that point, the law becomes a joke. Maryland’s blue law, for example, permitted people to buy food, gas, medicine and newspapers, but not, among other items, notebooks or toys. Yet large grocery stores might easily sell all of those items. If the store is open and selling food, what’s the point of denying someone the ability to buy a notebook as well?
A little advice for the clergy of Croatia: If you’re worried about people not coming to church on Sunday, don’t seek to shut down the competition. Instead, do a better job preaching.