(33)    Thu 5 Jun 97 15:23
By: Don Martin
To: Esther Steinbach
Re: special rights case
St:
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Esther Steinbach said "special rights case" to Don Martin,
adding:

 ES> Hi, folks.  Having come into this discussion late, I MUST ask just
 ES> what it is that Mr. Young says "could not have been alcoholic."

 DM> Wine. The little blivet imagines that the stuff
 DM> referred to in the Bible as "wine" was really grape
 DM> juice. Noah and Lot were simply allergy sufferers.

 ES> Allergy sufferers?? That's a good one. I guess they had
 ES> too much Benadryl, eh?

 ES> I'm wondering if one of the really knowledgeable people
 ES> in this echo can tell me just what is the etiology of
 ES> certain Christians' aversion to alcoholic beverages?
 ES> Did this start during the time of the drive for
 ES> Prohibition in this country, or does the origin lie
 ES> elsewhere?

    These little shits _gave_ us prohibition. The fundy,
eternally gnawed by the fear that somebody, somewhere, might
possibly be enjoying hirself, suffers from a bipolar mind.
Its only solution to _any_ human_ problem is to prohibit the
relevant behavior.

    The Temperence movement (which always defined temperence
not as "moderation" but as total abstinence: fundies do
wonderful things with language, too) was big in this country
in the 19th century. To be sure, there was a lot of
drunkeness here: a recent article in the Scientific American
estimates that in 1820, the per capita consumption in this
country was around 7.5 gallons of the equivalent of whiskey
per year: that was for every man, woman, and child, but the
men took care of most of it. That per capita figure is now
around 2.5 gallons, and there is no shortage of drunks these
days. (A year ago, there was something of a flap as
distillers broke their self-imposed ban to test TV
advertising in the San Antonio market--their gross sales are
down something like 35% in the past 15 years and they are
getting understandably desperate--we _are_ drinking less).
Given the fact that many husbands were drunken sots,
families had some real problems and the temperence movement
was very attractive to women: they rallied behind Carrie
Nation to form the WCTU (Women's Christian Temperence Union)
toward the end of the century.

    It is something of a tribute to the gentility of
bartenders in thopse halcyon days that Carrie Nation was not
sent packing with a baseball bat broken over her little
head: lacking the vote, the ladies opposed Demon Rum by
mobbing bars and chopping open barrels of the stuff
(Carrie's symbol was a hatchet). The WCTU was good at
getting out the vote, stuffing envelopes and providing
gruntwork for candidates who agreed with them. This was
particularly telling during WWI, when booze production was
downplayed for the "war effort" anyway, and when many "wet"
male voters were away from the polls in Europe. The
Prohibition Amendment was passed by Congress in December
1917 and ratified by the similarly "dry" state legislatures
in January 1919 (2 months after the Armistice).

    Like all prohibitions, this one affected the poor and
the powerless, but that was the point, so far as the WCTU
was concerned. Rich people, with their wine cellars, could
afford to be sots; working men could not. However, the
pennies of the poor, taken together, add up to a tidy sum,
enough to launch organized crime as an ongoing industry in
this country. Without the 18th Amendment, we might have
avoided the heroin and cocaine plagues run by this
diversified industry.

... Through a Jaundiced Eye Darkly--Rheum With a View
               (don@balt-rehab.med.va.gov)

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