Stuff You Should Know - What are blue laws?

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

Blue laws are laws that restrict certain activities on certain days. Are they antiquated? Yes! Are they still around? In some places, yes! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and of course the greatest, the goat, Jerry is with us as well, just quietly lurking in the background.

The greatest goat? The greatest. How you doing? I'm doing good Chuck. I'm a little, this was one of your picks, but I think I might be a little more enthusiastic about this one than you. Why do you say that? Because I said this is boring before you record it? A little bit. That may have something to do with it. And then me saying, oh no, I think it's pretty interesting. Oh, I don't think it's really that boring and it was my pick. Yeah, what made you choose that? Well, I mean, we're talking about blue laws and just very quickly, blue laws are laws from ancient times that have carried over

still in some places to modern day America and other countries as well, I guess, that restrict certain activities on certain days. But generally in the United States, we think of blue laws are things that you can't do on Sundays. A lot of time they're vices, like you can't drink or buy alcohol until sometimes at all or until certain times or maybe restrict working or gambling or just various things. But we had our own blue law, one blue law at least on the books in Georgia until just a few years ago, you could not buy alcohol on Sunday at all. Yeah, I think Georgia was the last state to repeal a full Sunday prohibition on buying alcohol. Full prohibition, but then, I mean, it passed by a ridiculous measure. 98%. But you still can't buy booze

before I think noon on Sunday. Right. And that's weird. And it seems like if you step back, if you were an alien, let's say, right, and you came down and you're like, that's a great word. So let's say you're morque for morque, right? Oh, okay. That's what you just reminded me of. Jazz bot. And you show up with your super cool block color puffy vest and you say, I want to familiarize myself with laws. This one makes sense. This makes sense. What? You can't buy alcohol before noon on Sundays. That doesn't make any sense. That was my impression of morque. If he dug a little deeper, it would become obvious that it makes a ton of sense if you're coming at it from the vantage point of a Christian in the Western hemisphere who

observes Sunday as the day of worship and rest, right? Sure. Yeah. Outside of that context, it doesn't make sense. And therein lies the rub. There's the big push and pull between people who are like, America was founded essentially on the idea and promise of a separation of church and state. We're supposed to keep those two separate. So we shouldn't have the state making laws that enthusiastically support one of the tenants of this one particular church, Christianity, which is you should not be doing a whole lot of stuff on Sunday, and you should probably be going to church. And other people who say, no, no, that's, it's actually a really, really good thing to do this. Even if you don't believe in religion,

even if you don't go to church, blue laws actually still help us out. Right. There have been arguments, including as we will learn, all the way up to the Supreme Court that say, well, that may have started religious, but there are many secular benefits to sort of forcing families to all be off work on the same day. At gunpoint. Go play together. Right. Take a walk. So I propose we talk about the history of blue laws first and then kind of get into some of the wackier ones and then talk about legality and so on and so forth. You could call what I'm doing now the table of contents. Do you agree to this table of contents? So are you saying you want to skip ahead to the where did blue

laws come from? That is my proposal. Okay. I love you springing this stuff on me. Spring. I am flexible though. I know. I know. Crazy. All I have to do is shuffle some paper. Okay. So you're 18. I mean, it makes sense because yeah, if you are an outside observer, even if you're an inside observer, you might not realize how ancient the blue laws are and that they actually conceivably, they don't necessarily predate Christianity, but they weren't necessarily, they're pretty old. How about that? Well, yeah. I mean, anyone who grew up going to church knows about the 10 commandments and knows that that fourth commandment says, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy or and keep it holy. And depending on what religion you are, that could be a different

day. Judaism Saturday, if you're a Seventh Day Adventist, that's Saturday. But Christianity at a certain point between the second and fifth centuries were like, yeah, you know, let's distance ourself from Judaism and let's move our day to Sunday. Right. That way, we can have our own day. We can tell everybody they're observing the wrong day. Right. And it's a win-win. Yeah. There's also the knock on effect of taking over Sunday from the pagans who observe Sunday as the day to worship the sun, hence the name Sunday. So it was basically total and complete encroachment and actually moving the Sabbath day to Sunday that caused that. That's pretty interesting. I hadn't known that before. So now we have the Christian saying,

okay, everybody, change of plans. I'm like that guy in the Fidelity commercial, change of plans. I haven't seen that. Oh man, he sounds like a bond villain. It's crazy. So the point was that the Christians said, okay, everybody, the Sabbath is now on Sunday. And then they followed that up with really enforcing that originally Jewish tenant, which was basically observe a day of rest and worship on the Sabbath and don't do anything else. Right. And we don't know exactly when the first laws were enacted, but it could have been. And this is the Grabster that helped put this one together for us. So thanks to Ed for that. But possibly in 363 AD at the Council of Ladosia? I would say Laodicea.

Laodicea. That's my guess. I thought that A might be silent. But weren't you raised Baptist? You don't know about the Council of Laodicea? I had never heard of it. Surely you're joking. I am joking. All right, because that was a meeting of leaders in the Christian religion who said we need to get some laws on the books. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it, but I hadn't. Or possibly the first laws were from ancient Rome. And I saw various Roman emperors who could have been responsible for these. I saw Constantine in 321. Yeah, I think I saw one of the other dudes, but I can't remember which one.

I got that from the Valdosta Times news source. So take that or leave it. That's right. So you had a bunch of Christian rulers, essentially, is the upshot of all this that kind of took over and started issuing these proclamations and decrees and stuff about observing the Sabbath, right? Yeah, for hundreds of years this happened in various ways, various laws saying you can do this, you can't do that. I think the Protestants were a little less into it, but not really. I mean, they were still into it. I think it would be disingenuous to say the Protestants were just fine with it. With doing whatever on Sunday.

Supposedly, right. I think it wasn't that they weren't cool with just not having a Sabbath day of some sort. It was Martin Luther wasn't big into following the old-time rules, and he was saying like, it doesn't have to be Sunday, don't be ridiculous, but do a day a week. But the irony of the whole thing is that Protestants would come to be like some of the biggest enforcers and writers of blue laws in America, especially as Sunday being the Sabbath day, like defending Sunday in particular. Right. And so these get enacted there. Obviously, when the colonies are being formed, they make their way over there. Mm-hmm. The Puritans were like, oh, great. This is perfect.

This is right up our alley. We're all about restricting people whenever. Sunday, that's fine. We'll restrict people on Sunday. And by the time the colonies rolled around, they were pretty well ensconced, such that there's even a story. I think you couldn't really do much of anything on Sundays in the colonial times, but there's a story from 1789 where supposedly George Washington himself was tracked down or at least stopped by a sheriff for traveling on a Sunday, even though he was traveling to church. Yeah, because the premise was that saddling up your horse or connecting a team of horses to a carriage or whatever,

that constituted labor, and you weren't supposed to be doing any kind of labor on Sunday. And speaking of the colonies, Chuck, I turned up something about Jamestown's blue laws. They had their first blue law enacted in 1610, like right out of the gate. One of the first things they said was, here's some blue laws, everybody gather around. So basically, you couldn't do, like you were saying, anything on a Sunday. And attendance at church was mandatory on Sunday. So the blue laws actually made a lot more sense in that context, right? Like, did they call roll?

But I'm guessing there was probably some sort of like social, you know, people snitching on one another kind of thing. Right. Like, you notice who's not here, right? Right. But in that context, the blue law makes more sense because it's like, you were supposed to be in church, and if you do anything other than church, here are your punishments, right? Yeah, sure. But the punishments were really severe, like the first time you were caught doing anything,

but going to church on a Sunday, you would go a week without food, like you got your food from like the village, the village all gathered and shared food. It was super socialist, right? And you weren't, you were disinvited from that party? Until the next Sabbath, you did not get food. And that usually was enough to straighten anybody out. The second time you would lose your allowance for a week, and then you would also be whipped at the stake.

The third time they just killed you. The third time they caught you doing something other than going to church on the Sabbath. Even say after you'd been to church that day, they would kill you. That was the punishment for it. So they were quite serious about that kind of thing. But over time, that kind of fell away, fell to the wayside, especially as America took up this project that was led by people like Thomas Jefferson, called disestablishmentarianism, right?

Yeah. And that's from the original word disestablishment. And then of course, the very famous longer word, the every elementary school student knows. And can spell. It's the longest word. Is it still the longest word? I don't know. Anti-disestablishmentarianism.

Which I always thought was just like, oh, what does that even mean? Like, is that a real word? But it's a real word. And now that we know what all this means, it makes perfect sense. Yeah, because disestablishmentarianism was that movement that basically said, look, we need to get the government out of the business of supporting churches. Because there's a lot more churches than there used to be when we were colonies. A lot of different Christian sects.

And the government shouldn't really throw its lot into one against the other. That's a really English thing to do. Because I think even in the 90s, there was a movement, or there's still a movement afoot in the UK to basically be like, okay, state, stop supporting the Anglican church. It's not, you know, there should be a separation. The Americans picked up on that very early on. And so that led to this, like a bunch of laws and stuff that basically said,

we're supporting religious freedom, not casting our lot with one particular sect or religion or another. So here in America, you can practice whatever religion you want. And you can expect the government not to promote some other rival religion. Somebody else's team over yours, because that's not fair. All right, you know what? That's a great cliffhanger. Okay, we'll take a little break here and we'll talk about what that resulted in right after this.

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So here's where we are. The United States gets into disestablishment, which basically was, hey, we can't throw all of our eggs in one denominational basket. Right. Because there are a lot of different denominations here and we respect them all, as long as they're Christian, basically. That's a parenthetical to that song title. And what kind of happened was, I guess there's no other way to say it other than evangelicals,

Protestant evangelicals said, you know what, this is a great opportunity for us to really sort of grab the reins of power and to put our morals and our values on everybody else through law. Yeah, because every single average American wasn't like, yeah, government, get out of the business of supporting churches and get into just freedom of religion. There are plenty of people, and this is the late 18th century and early 19th century, first half of 19th century, there are plenty of people who are like, no, you guys have supported my church forever, let's just keep doing that. And so in that kind of sense of, probably a certain sense of betrayal or loss of trust,

a lot of religious leaders became political and stepped up that amazing word, anti-disestablishmentarianism, which is fighting against that idea and basically saying, no, America supports Protestant churches. Basically, America is waspy is what they were trying to say. Yeah, and it's funny, like if you think that this sort of thing started happening in the 1980s, that was just a re-establishment, like it started happening in the 1780s, really. Yeah, that was the anti-disestablishmentarianism revival. That's right. They printed t-shirts for Christian universities, and they sold like hotcakes, I think. So, all right, here's what they're doing. They're trying to establish power,

but there's a problem in that as America grew, the economy grew and businesses grew, and it didn't necessarily jibe with this shut everything down one day of the week mentality. They were like, hey, there's money to be made on these days, and there are things to do on these days off that you're sort of making a stake. So, there was sort of conflict even way back then between, I guess, the secular and the religious. Yeah, and I think that's ultimately the thing that is the greatest tension at the heart of this, at least in America. This idea like, no, the whole purpose of government, the whole reason for everyone living is to make a lot of money for a certain select group of people. So,

everybody get back to work. What are you talking about taking the day off on Sunday? That's a full day you could be making as profit. So, that became diametrically opposed to the idea of blue laws, and you had two really powerful institutions, the church or all of the churches that celebrated the Sabbath on Sunday versus the captains of industry who were just now starting to really make ungodly amounts of money during the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States. That's right, as well as Jewish people and Seventh Day Adventists and just regular, secular people who were just like, no, we shouldn't be doing stuff like this at all. Yeah. What is separation of church and state all about if we're still going to do stuff like this?

I'm really glad you said that too, because one thing that blue laws do is make really strange bedfellows. So, in league with the churchy types, you had labor unions, and you still do, actually. Labor unions still typically tend to support blue laws because religious or not, their workers are still getting the day off on Sunday with their families. That's right. And on the other side, like you said, it's captains of industry along with Seventh Day Adventists and Jewish people along with secular types. I mean, those are not groups that you would normally put together on the kickball field or something, you know? That's right. And they had a couple of names. The Sabotarians were the Evangelicals,

the Protestant Evangelicals. And like you said, labor unions and groups like that. And then the Anti-Sabotarians were the others. And they kind of battled it out for a little while. And in the end, it turns out, and this should come as no surprise, there were more Anti-Sabotarians who were like, no, we should not have these days off and we should separate church and state. But the Sabotarians were louder and they were more fired up, basically. And they got people out to vote more and they got people to sign petitions more and to put more pressure on officials who decided these things. And so, in the end, what they did, I mean, I don't know if it was a win-win or a lose-lose, the blue laws kind of stayed pretty firmly entrenched on the books.

But the Anti-Sabotarians were able to carve out certain exceptions, basically, like, hey, we should be able to do this and this and maybe stores can be open. But then the Sabotarians were like, yeah, but no alcohol whatsoever. So it kind of played out like this. I don't know if calling it a negotiation is the right term, but a long drawn out battle. Let's call it a compromise. Sure. So the effect of all of this is that over time, it seemed like in the 20th century, it really started to erode. These little, these exceptions got bigger and bigger and carved out more and more of these blanket blue laws that, remember, originally started out as basically,

like, you cannot do anything on Sunday. Yeah. And then it was like, except you can go and buy ice cream at the beach or you can buy milk, but you're not allowed to buy anything to put milk in. Just all sorts of weird stuff that made the whole thing seem really arbitrary. And there's this idea like, okay, if you're going to the beach, you can buy ice cream at the beach, but if you went into town, you would not be able to legally buy ice cream. How does that make any sense? It doesn't. Well, it does in a certain way, depending on how you look at the role of government. And in this case, it is arbitrary. It does impact one group in town storekeepers in favor

of another group, beachside ice cream vendors, right? But if you believe that the role of government is in part not just to support the economic activity of the citizens of the United States, but instead to support their well-being as well, then it does make sense because what they're basically saying is, okay, we want to encourage people to take that trip to the beach with their family on Sunday. And what makes a beach trip that much more enjoyable? Ice cream. I don't think I've ever had ice cream on the beach. I haven't either, but apparently it was all the rage during the 30s and 40s and 50s. I get it. I mean, I bet it's nice. Sure.

I love ice cream and I love beaches. We got to try it sometime. We have to go to a beach and eat some ice cream very soon, Chuck, okay? Yeah, sure. So it makes sense in that respect, but yes, if you're one of those people who are like, no, these laws all need to make sense, they need to follow all the rules, then you probably have a pretty big problem with blue laws. Yeah. Should we talk about a few of these blue laws still on the books? I think so. So we mentioned Georgia, like I said, up until just a few years ago. It was on the ballot to

be allowed to buy alcohol on Sundays, but still, if you go to Sunday brunch, and this was the same in, believe it or not, in New York until 2016, if you go to brunch on a Sunday, you couldn't buy booze at a bar or restaurant until noon. I think in New York, they changed it to 10, but I think in Georgia, I don't really do brunch much anymore, but I think it's still noon. As far as I know, it's still noon, but yeah, I haven't done brunch in a couple of years now. If you get the jump on things and you're like, oh, we got to beat those brunch crowds and get there at 11, there's a reason the brunch crowds come later and it ain't church. No, but church is the reason why they set that time on Sundays to start around noon,

because it's like, okay, everybody has a reasonable chance to go to the morning services, and then they can get drunk. Everyone wins, basically. It's funny. I remember growing up in the Baptist church, it was just sort of this implied agreement between the congregation, most of the congregation, and the preacher, that you wrap it up by noon because of lunch and football, basically. And there were some Sundays where the spirit was raging within the church, and things would start to, he'd be feeling it, and things would start to go a little long, and you would really sense the shifting of bodies and the looking at watches and the unease among the congregation,

usually the dads that are like, all right, I'm glad everyone's feeling it and everything, but the Falcons kick off soon. We need to get out of here, and I remember being a kid, like being like 12 years old and sensing that, and being on the side of football. That's funny. I have the opposite experience, where I'm like, I always dread somebody tying it up and going into overtime and preempting 60 minutes on Sunday. It happened this past Sunday as recently as that. I could tell at the beginning of the fourth quarter that the Cowboys and the Patriots were going to tie it up and go to overtime, and I, of course, was right. They'd have to wait like an extra hour for 60 minutes. Do you still watch 60 minutes?

Yeah, I watch it more than ever now. It's really great. I used to watch it as a, believe it or not, as like a high school student. I was really into it, and maybe some in college, but I haven't really watched it in a long time. That's interesting then, because they had around that time in the early 90s, they had a very famous piece on the Council of Leo to see you. Do they still use that stopwatch? Yeah, totally. Good crew they've got. They've got a good crew together. Yeah, are there any remnants? Anyone still around from the old days? Scott Pelley's on there. He's been on there for a while, I think, right? See, that shows how long it's been for me. I'm like, is Morley safer around? I don't know.

I think Morley safer might be dead. I think they're probably all gone. Anderson Cooper's on there though. He's great too. Sharon Alfonzi. Everybody on there is fantastic. They should have you on. There's no need for them to have me on. I'm just a fan. No, but that could be your next, that could be like your retirement job. Hosting 60 minutes, doing pieces on 60 minutes? Yeah, you'd be great. I don't know if that's true, but I appreciate the vote. How cool would that be? I can hear that ticking stopwatch behind you as you speak. I know. It would make me tense if I actually worked for him. I think I would ruin 60 minutes for me. I'd just rather kick back and watch it.

Don't make me work so much. Some of the other really interesting blue laws. We should say too that there are blue laws on the books in a lot of places that aren't enforced and then there are blue laws on the books that are still enforced. In Texas, Illinois, and I think North Dakota, I think it's North Dakota, you cannot sell a car. Or buy a car. I guess you could sell one. I wonder if you're breaking the law if you sell one on Craigslist or something. If you meet up at the parking lot. Yeah, I think there's no car sales whatsoever allowed. Here's why. That one, I was like, okay, I do not get this one. I had to search pretty far and wide for why, but apparently it

was one of those things that's like a remnant from when you couldn't do anything and then they started making exceptions and started making exceptions saying, okay, you can open this kind of store. You can sell this kind of item. Cars just never got accepted because the car dealerships didn't want that any longer. It made sense. They wanted a day off. It's really hard work. They wanted to give a time off to their employees. They also didn't want to have to pay to keep the lights on and all that stuff an extra day, but if even one dealership was allowed to stay open, then all of them would have to. So if there was a state law that said no car dealerships can be open, then that gave the people in the car dealership industry that day off that they otherwise

definitely would not have had. So it makes sense in that case. You know what I'm saying? Because McIntyre Hyundai would start selling. Exactly. And then everyone's like, you see what McIntyre's doing? We got to open up now. In Texas in particular, they allowed for Jewish or Seventh Day Adventist car dealership owners by saying, okay, you don't have to close on Sunday, but if you don't close on Sunday, you have to close on Saturday. So one day out of the weekend, your dealership has to be closed, which helped keep from promoting unfair competition. Right. Well, football is big in Texas. I wonder if it comes down to you into college, you into pro. I saw somewhere that the NFL played on Sunday because early on they couldn't compete with college

games held on Saturday, but I'm not sure if that's true or not. That makes sense. And I think now they are almost expressly prohibited from having Saturday games in the NFL. Yes. Because of an agreement with the NCAA. But I think there's the exception. I think sometimes at one point in the playoffs, they have like one weekend when there's a Saturday game in like December or something like that. They're allowed to think so. That's it. It's like a law. I think so. Isn't that crazy? That's like a federal law. There's like has something to do with broadcasting or something like that. You know, the NFL plays in London occasionally now too. Like, and my buddy Justin from London was wondering, he was like, why are they playing these games at nine in the morning

US time? Because like they could have them at a more appropriate time in England. And I was like, dude, that means it's because of advertising. That means from nine a.m. they can lock up the entire TV day. Yeah, they did this past weekend and they preempted CBS Sunday morning too. That's right. They can lock it up from 9 a.m. till 4 30 or whatever. Yep. It was a hell day basically this past Sunday. It was hellish for me. It was a hell Sabbath. I thought you like football. No, no, I don't really watch football anymore. And I definitely have never been in a pro. I used to be in the college. Yeah. All right. But that's fine. I don't poo poo it or anything like that. I'm just not. No, I got you. Maine in Virginia, you're not allowed to hunt on

Sundays. Makes sense. Maine is sort of, we love our weird Maine or friends, but they up until 1990 you couldn't shop in a department store on Sunday. That one makes sense because department stores sold so many different items that they said it's just easier for you to stay closed on Sundays. Yeah. And it's interesting because, you know, there's the case of Bergen County, New Jersey, which that's here's the deal. That's in Bergen County, it's a holdover from the old days, but it has more to do with helping the mom and pop stores because in the, I guess it was in the 1950s, Bergen County was one of the first big suburbs outside of New York. And it was, I think, one of the first big areas of like kind of shopping mall retail experience kind of thing in the United States.

Right. And they, I mean, I was trying to think of a different way to say that. I like retail experience. And the idea was, and still is, and you know, when I said it a minute ago, we talked about mom and pop stores on Sundays, like having to pay employees. That's really what it came down to, was mom and pop stores were willing to close on Sunday so they could rest and chill out with their family or maybe go to church. And they wouldn't have to pay their employees and they wouldn't have to pay as much electricity and just the cost of operating. But the big box stores moved in and they didn't care. They could afford to keep the lights on. They could afford to pay their employees and they didn't want to lose that revenue. So all of a sudden, the mom and

pop stores were getting crushed on Sundays by these larger chain stores in these shopping malls. And so Bergen County still is the one holdout in the United States in Bergen County, New Jersey, where you can't shop basically on a Sunday. And it's come up time and time again and they keep saying no. Yeah, I think as recently as 2013, they couldn't even get enough signatures to get it onto the ballot, let alone votes. I think they just like it. They do. And I saw it's not just because they know it helps mom and pop stores or it gives people a day off, but that apparently traffic around there is a living nightmare every other day of the week. So it's at least one day where traffic doesn't stink. The North Dakota ban is really interesting. I think they had one of

the last statewide bans on shopping known as offenses against religion and conscience repealed in 1991. But the exceptions are what's always strange. Their exceptions were ice cream, newspapers, cigars, medicine, of course, restaurants, hotels, and owner operated stores with three employees or fewer. Yeah, that is strange for sure. But I think it's not necessarily peculiar. I think that's how most blue laws ended up in states where they had prohibitions on shopping, because over time a lobbyist would show up and one of their friends would end up as governor or legislature and they would get their particular industry carved out as an exception. No, not that there are exceptions. I just think what's carved out is always really interesting to me. I found this

article from 1985 when they repealed Texas's blue laws. They were in force from like 1961-85. And this article was just talking about how weird they were by 1985. And it said that you could go into a store and you could buy a blank videotape, but you couldn't buy one of videotape with something already on it, which is just those little quirks are so weird and interesting and they made sense in some way. But then I'm sure somebody was like, you know, that exception was made before there was even such a thing as videotapes. And then even now it's even funnier because there's not videotapes any longer. They've already come and gone. Right. But like you're saying, it's all about who cares, like what lobby cares the most, like the cigars thing in North Dakota, just obviously somebody

with a steak and a cigar company grease the right palms. Yeah. St. Maryland, as we'll see, had a lot of laws, a lot of restrictions on it, but they had all tobacco products were exempted because it was a huge tobacco state in like the mid-century or during the mid-century, last century. All right. I think we should take another, our final break here and we'll talk about, you know, whether these things are legal and what the Supreme Court and the feds have to say about all this coming up. What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously,

I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born,

it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer,

I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck. So we're talking about legality. Because like we said, anybody who takes even a cursory look at these laws can make a pretty great argument that these should not be on the books. Number one, the government shouldn't be regulating anything that has anything to do with religion. Right. Certainly shouldn't be telling people who don't practice religion to observe this religious day. That's a big one. But then also, they just don't really make a lot of sense. And that's another kind of litmus test for laws. They're supposed to be sensible and apply to

basically everyone equally. Sure, because this is America. Yeah. So you would think then that the Supreme Court would have taken one look at these things and been like, get these out of here, get them out of my face. And that is not the case because not only did the Supreme Court get its shot at ruling on blue laws as early as 1961, it has pretty much consistently upheld the legality and the constitutionality of blue laws ever since then. Yeah. And we should note that none of these are federal laws. They are all at the most state laws, but many times even like local ordinances and city and kind of county laws. But I think it was McGowan versus Maryland, the Maryland in 1961, which went to the Supreme Court. And this, you know, it's interesting

that Maryland is the one that kind of keeps getting talked about because of their, I guess, their tobacco laws and then their beach scene. They wanted to sell that ice cream on the beach. Definitely. And floaties and stuff like that, right? Yeah. And supreme, I think they went eight one in Maryland's favor saying that blue laws could stand. And Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote this opinion that basically says, yeah, you know, it may have started out as religious, but like we said earlier, it serves the secular society. And there's a benefit to everybody basically to have a regulated day of rest. And William Douglas had this, I think it was the lone dissenter. And basically in his opinion was like, that's a

load of horse manure. We all know what these are there for. And like, I'm not buying it. No. And Earl Warren, I don't know if his interpretation would be constructionalist or what, but in his opinion, he basically said the constitution says that the government won't infringe on somebody's religious rights. And I don't see how anybody who is saying that they're being forced to take the day off has their religious rights being infringed upon. And Douglas is like, come on, man, that's not what anybody's saying. They're saying that the government is basically supporting this Christian worldview of Sunday being the Sabbath by allowing these laws that enforce a day off on the Sabbath. And that that is just how that like, that's the

government is supporting a religion and that's not okay. But the Supreme Court is just like I said, consistently upheld Warren's view that no, these are actually okay, because even if you're not a religious person, you're benefiting from them anyway. Yeah. And it seemed like William Douglas also wanted to make a point that like, he was like, we're so firmly ensconced in this Christian nation that like, we don't even realize like Sunday shouldn't be different than any other day. And we don't, we don't, we have all these things in our society that treat Sunday different because it was, you know, it was, it's such a Christian nation. And like, even though there's separation of church and state, like we don't even realize that we're

biased either for or against Sunday for those reasons. Yeah. A really good thought experiment I stumbled on was imagining the government decreeing Tuesday as the day of rest for everybody. Yeah, exactly. And how bizarre that would seem to almost every single person in America. Yeah. Our podcast would be over. Because that's what we record. Yeah. But that would be that, like that, that really kind of supports Douglas's point. Like, no, like you guys are really coming from this, like, it's so entrenched into your worldview that you can't imagine Sunday is not a day of rest. Like that's the day of rest. But that is a Christian belief. It's an ancient one. But that is at its root of Christian belief in that, that if you are a separation of church and

state type, like that will drive you up the wall, that there are such things as blue laws, and they have been deemed constitutional. But see, I'm that way too. Like that stuff drives me crazy. But as a secularist now, if I had a dollar for every time I complained about like, oh, come on, it's a Sunday. We all use Sunday as either an excuse to not do something or an excuse to do something. Like it's just become the national day, I feel like. Well, you're a Warren fan and you don't even know it. I read this really interesting article in Vox that was basically endorsing Warren's opinion is by this economist named Lyman Stone. It's called Why We Need Blue Laws. I think the title is a little longer, but if you search that, it'll turn

this up. And Lyman Stone was basically saying like, what Chief Justice Earl Warren is saying is actually a really progressive view of the role of government. And it was what I was saying earlier that there's this interpretation that government can exist to help support the well-being of its citizens. And one way to do that is to say, hey, you know, yeah, Sunday's a Christian day. Yeah, the churches are really making out like bandits with these blue laws, bully for them. You over here, come talk to me over here. You're still getting a lot out of this because you get the day off and your whole family gets the day off all at the same time. And trust me, you do not want to work seven days a week. This is a really great way for us in a roundabout

way to make sure you have the day off. And that is something that that is going to help you. And we as the government are interested in you not going crazy and shooting up your workplace because you work too much. Right. Ed points out something too that I agree with a bit of a paradox though with the blue laws. If you're giving people this day off together as a family, but you're also closing businesses that, you know, if that's your day to do stuff or to get stuff done even, then that's a paradox because, all right, I've got Sunday off with my family, but I can't go to the mall if that's what you want to do if I live in Bergen County. Right. So Lyman Stone has an answer for that as well. What does the stoner have to say? Stoner says as follows, basically TS,

like, yeah, the post office is closed on Sunday. Go take some time and mail it another day, which on the one hand it's like, there's a lot of people who have to take the bus and have to actually take time off of work and could conceivably get fired from their job for needing to go mail a package. I think Lyman Stone would say, well, you should keep the post offices open on Saturday, but the bigger risk to Lyman Stone is that if you keep some stuff open, like restaurants or something like that, you actually create a second class of workers who exist to serve the upper class of workers who get Sunday off. And after all, isn't that like pretty undemocratic and terrible to kind of separate people like that? Why not just close everything and give everybody

everybody the same day off? Yeah, I feel that way sometimes when I'm doing something on a Sunday and someone has to work and I remember having to work on Sunday and I hated it. It comes home for me most on like, say, like Thanksgiving or something where people have to work for Black Friday or stuff like that. Like that to me, it's the same thing, but it's when it really sticks out to me. Well, this is something, my friend, that you would think that there are studies about commerce and economics and surely they have proven one way or the other, which is the best way forward, right? Right. The end. Well, they have done some studies and it kind of depends on which study you're looking at as far as quantifying these effects and how they're measured. But

when it comes to alcohol, their studies have shown that there are not more car accidents happening because people can drink on Sundays. And that's, you know, some people argue like, hey, people aren't drinking. They may not be drinking and driving and then getting in car crashes. But that hasn't really turned out that way. Yeah. No, that's pretty surprising too, because a lot of these studies have turned up kind of counterintuitive things. There was a study conducted in Georgia that looked like, Georgia is a great test case because there's so many counties that have blue laws and other counties that don't have blue laws. So you can like just compare these really similar populations with one another. And they found that if you have a

county that has a blue law and one that doesn't, there's virtually no difference in alcohol consumption between the two. But there are like little tiny changes like the employees in the county without a blue law might make slightly more money because they can work on Sundays. Or in counties that do have blue laws, liquor stores make a little bit less than their counterparts in counties without blue laws. Stuff you'd kind of expect, but the difference in alcohol consumption, I thought that was a little interesting. I guess people just load up more on Saturday night than they would if they lived in a county that wasn't dry on Sundays. Maybe. Maybe they're hungover on Sunday. Maybe they just take it a little easier on Sunday except

to work on Monday. Another counterintuitive effect as far as shopping goes in places like Bergen County is they have found that people, it doesn't decrease the overall retail experience in terms of dollars. I love that term now, the retail experience. Because some people would argue like, oh, if we close on Sundays, then we're just going to lose out on business. But I think they have found that when these laws are in place and people know that they're closed on Sundays, they just do their shopping Monday through Saturday. And they still buy the same amount of stuff. Exactly. I found one study from 2008 from MIT that was almost like cartoonish in its results. You ready for this? They studied 50 years of repeal blue laws and they found that

repealing blue laws decreases church attendance and church donations significantly. Although there's no other change in charitable activity. It's just churches who are basically now competing against other pastimes and activities and the churches lose big time unless they have state enforced support for people to go to them in the form of blue laws. And they also saw that repealing blue laws led to an increase in drinking and drug use. And the increased drinking and drug use was most pronounced in those people who used to attend church, but then stopped attending church after the blue laws were repealed. So basically everything that if you were into blue laws, we're afraid of, this 2008 MIT study said like, yeah, absolutely.

It's as bad as you think, maybe even worse. Holy cow. Isn't that interesting? That's super interesting. Yeah. I guess the last thing we need to cover is why they're called blue laws. Yeah, indeed. There are a lot of theories. It says no one knows for sure. And I think that's probably true. But the one I've seen most often, although it is the internet, so that really means nothing, is that the Puritans, I saw that they wrote their laws in general on blue paper, then I also saw where they wrote their Sunday laws specifically on blue paper. That one makes sense more than the other. Yes. The thing is, is no historian ever in the world has ever turned up a real life example of one of these things, right? So that one might be apocryphal. There's another one that, Ed makes

a really good point that there's some slang terms that were in existence around the time that these laws started being called blue laws about the end of the 18th century. And the two slang terms were blue nose and blue stocking. And both of them basically referred to a Prudish rigid person who was so miserly that they just saved money anyway they could. The one had a blue nose because they wouldn't cough up money for heating in the winter time, so their nose turned blue. And the other was that they had blue stockings because they used blue yarn to med their socks rather than getting new ones. But either way, it paints a pretty good picture. Something tells me, if you saw somebody's tip they left and you're like, nice tip blue nose,

they would probably think that's super offensive or something. Probably. And I'm not convinced there's not some really bad offense in there somewhere that we're just not seeing. It's possible. Isn't there something to be taken offense to and everything? Probably blue nose. Ouch. You got anything else? I do not, sir. Well, if you want to know more about blue laws, start studying them. They are hilarious and entertaining. And since I said hilarious and entertaining, it's time, of course, for listener mail. I'm going to call this follow up to I don't know about that. Oh, yeah. I think it was during the research bias episode. I talked about a certain breed. I'm sure it happens everywhere, but there's a certain breed of Southerner

when they're being debated and presented with literal facts. They just go, I don't know about that. And that's sort of the end of things. And so this is from Rebecca. I was glad to see this email. Chuck talked about how much he hated it when people say I don't know about that. When presented with evidence that contradicts their worldview, there's a term for that. It's called a thought terminating cliche, almost a circle, which is a dismissive tactic as a speaker. And they will use it to end a debate when they encounter cognitive dissonance or when someone presents them with facts that run counter to their established beliefs. Other examples are, boy, I hate all these. Let's agree to disagree. Yeah, sometimes it's like,

this is the only way to end a conversation. I know. I think just say it a different way. There's something about that that I just don't like. Oh, so it's the cliche part you don't like more than the thought terminating part. It's both, but definitely if it was said in another way, I'd probably be more apt to accept it. How about let's continue to not agree on this forever. But both be okay. What's that? Yeah, yeah, there you go. That's just your opinion is another one. And it's all good. That's the worst. Yeah, especially when that's followed by bro and said by somebody who has a soul patch. I unfortunately don't know what tactics there are to respond to such cliches and reopen discussion, but maybe an episode on intentional fallacies would be a

great way to educate listeners on the rhetorical tactics the journalist politicians and debaters use to sway the course of an argument. Anyway, it's all good. And that is a great email. That's from Rebecca in Chicago. Thanks, Rebecca. That was indeed one of the tops as far as emails we've received goes. Thank you for it. And if you want to see if you can put one up on Rebecca, let's hear it. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice

would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in major league baseball, international banks, k-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view

on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.