A Sobering Look at Sunday

"At Last, Easing Up on Sunday Liquor Laws" [July 21-28]: From the title on down, this article is sneering about churches trying to keep paying members in their pews.

It makes "dry" areas sound like counties full of uneducated hillbillies. What it doesn't look at is how some communities have rejected the idea of a country that never sleeps in favor of keeping one day a week for family, church, or whatever. Society in the United States today no longer values the day of rest that Sunday used to be. No one since Prohibition has said alcohol couldn't be consumed on Sundays—quite the opposite, the Sunday barbecue is as American as apple pie—but rather that mad commercialism could be given a rest and people just hang out together one day a week.

Lori Armstrong
Dover, Delaware

Having served in law enforcement for 28 years and seen the devastating results of alcohol abuse, I challenge U.S. News to produce a cost analysis juxtaposing the increase of tax revenue from liquor sales and the outgo of tax revenue used to treat the results of alcohol-related incidents and crime. In such a study, various institutions should be considered, including services for abused spouses and children, financial support for families of alcoholics, and financial support for hospitals treating the injured from alcohol-related incidents. The list goes on. I suspect that it will not be a break-even proposition, and the results will be sobering.

Ernest A. Brown
Webster, Florida