Ray Newman has been studying a state map since last week’s Sunday alcohol sales referendums. A pastor and lobbyist for the Georgia Baptist Convention, Newman can cite one town after another where voters overturned blue laws.
Griffin, Pooler, Kingston: There, and elsewhere across the state, voters overwhelmingly embraced Sunday sales.
Georgia has diversified, said Newman, meaning the devil’s breath — alcohol — doesn’t smell quite as foul as it once did. Booze isn’t as widely stigmatized today. “People have come to Georgia from all over the United States and the world,” Newman said. “We’ve seen a cultural shift.”
Two decades ago, said Newman, voters never would have gotten the chance to decide whether alcohol could be sold on Sunday, the “Lord’s day.” Lawmakers would have heeded the exhortations of pastors and killed any legislation that proposed changing alcohol laws, he said.
This time around, voters — knowing their communities face hard economic times — decided to lay aside questions about the morality of alcohol sales in favor of the sales-tax revenue proponents argued it would raise.
“We’re struggling down here,” Said Sewell, a political science professor at Fort Valley State University, said. “This [enhanced alcohol sales] is a great opportunity for small towns.”
Ministers who could have preached against the proposal were largely quiet. Opponents of Sunday sales also believe it would have been easier to contest the issue if it been on the ballot statewide. Effectively fighting more than 100 local elections, they said, was difficult. Making it even harder was the economic challenges cities and towns are facing.
On Tuesday, Fort Valley voters approved liquor by the drink — the Sunday measure wasn’t on the ballot — by a comfortable margin. Voters in nearby Byron just as easily approved mixed-drink sales and Sunday purchases. The sales proposal also passed in neighboring Centerville and Warner Robins.
Frances McDaniel, who greets travelers coming off I-75 who stop at the Byron Welcome Center, was succinct.
“I’m not a drinker,” said McDaniel, who said she voted for Sunday sales and liquor by the drink. “I look at the economics of it.”
The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, a trade organization representing more than 5,000 brands of liquors, estimates that Sunday sales of distilled alcohol across Georgia will raise $4.8 million in extra sales taxes.
Derrick Lemons, an anthropology and religion instructor at the University of Georgia, agreed that rural Georgians who cast ballots for Sunday sales voted based on economic concerns.
“Money was definitely an influence,” said Lemons, an ordained Methodist minister who’s studied religious practices in rural Southern communities. “With our economy struggling the way it is, cities and counties are trying to bolster their bottom line.”
Tuesday’s votes also show “the decreasing importance of religion in American society,” said Edwin Jackson, a Georgia historian who’s retired from the Carl Vinson Institute of Government in Athens. “Much of the opposition to Sunday sales is probably associated with opposition to any sale of alcoholic beverages.”
Lonzy Edwards, a Macon pastor and Bibb County commissioner, agreed that alcohol isn’t as stigmatized as it once was.
“This is just a legal reality. It’s a legal product,” he said. “We tried Prohibition, and we know how that turned out.”
Prohibition, America’s experiment with teetotaling, began in 1920 and ended in 1933. Georgia laws forbidding the sale of alcohol on Sunday remained on the books.
Selling alcohol wasn’t the only practice blacklisted on Sunday, recalled former Gov. Carl Sanders.
“Back then, they wouldn’t even let you go fishing on Sundays,” said Sanders, governor from 1963-1967. “Of course, people went fishing anyway.”
And legislators, said Sanders, would drink at night, only to turn down proposals to loosen alcohol laws in the sober light of day. They didn’t want to antagonize pastors and constituents, Sanders said.
“They drank wet and voted dry,” said Sanders, first elected to the House of Representatives in 1954. “Those boys, the last thing they’d want to do is vote for a bill for mixed drinks or Sunday sales.”
The Sunday sale of alcohol is more than just a moral issue, said Jerry Luquire, president of the Georgia Christian Coalition. The organization ran a low-level campaign against Sunday sales, appealing to preachers and arguing that an additional day of alcohol transactions would increase traffic accidents and domestic violence.
Two decades ago, the organization campaigned against the creation of the Georgia Lottery. And, though that campaign failed — voters approved the lottery in 1992 — pastors across the state heeded the coalition’s request to use their pulpits to condemn gambling.
This time, said Luquire, few pastors answered that call.
“I think pastors today are more concerned about being looked upon as relics,” he said. “They’re too worried about their image.”
Ministers have an obligation to speak about alcohol sales, said Bryan Myers, an associate pastor at Central Baptist Church in Americus. The Sumter County city’s voters turned down Sunday sales.
“I was against it,” said Myers. “I told [church members] where I stood, and told them to vote their conscience. If the vote was for alcohol sales on Saturdays, I’d have voted against that, too.”
Sunday shouldn’t be sullied by alcohol sales, said Daniel Graves, an Elberton banker and president of the Elbert County of Chamber of Commerce. Elbert County, 110 miles northeast of Atlanta, voted down the measure by more than a 2-1 margin.
“The world is getting bigger, faster, stronger every day,” he said. “But Sunday is a day of rest. For me, it’s a day of faith.
“Elberton is different from Atlanta,” he said. “We’re a little slower in the pace of life here.”
Downtown Elberton also is a 15-minute drive from South Carolina, where the Sunday sale of beer and wine is legal. Does Tuesday’s vote mean Elberton imbibers will take their money across the state line once a week?
Graves laughed. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t drink.”
Officials in Glynn County and Brunswick are watching to see what Tuesday’s referendums will mean to different bottom lines. Voters in the coastal county 270 miles south of Atlanta approved Sunday sales. Brunswick, its county seat, turned down the proposal.
M.H. “Woody” Woodside, president of the Brunswick-Golden Isles Chamber of Commerce, struggled to explain the different outcomes. A chamber membership survey indicated the measure would win approval in both jurisdictions, he said.
“I know the city could have used the revenue this would have generated,” he said. “That’s not going to happen,”
But Woodside did see a plus in the vote: Neighboring McIntosh County didn’t have a Sunday sales referendum. It’s as dry as a cast-off beer can.
“On Sundays,” he predicted, “they’ll be running over here.”
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