Got the Puritan blues

THE PURITANS of Massachusetts have been dead for 300 years, but their authoritarian ghosts haunt us to this day.

Consider the plight of Whole Foods Market, an international chain of natural and organic food stores, which found itself accused of planning to engage in criminal activity in its 14 Massachusetts stores this week.

What high crimes and misdemeanors was the upscale grocer plotting? It was going to open its doors for business on Thanksgiving. Shocking! It was going to sell fruit and vegetables and milk and desserts.

...

...Whole Foods was going to make its wares available to Massachusetts customers on Thanksgiving -- just as it does for customers in Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and two-dozen other states nationwide. Bay State consumers panicked over an eleventh-hour shortage of dried apricots or hazelnut extract would have been able to get what they needed before the in-laws showed up at the front door. Whole Foods employees wouldn't have been required to work, but those volunteering would have earned double pay. Willing seller, willing buyers, willing workers -- an economist looking at such an arrangement would have seen the free market at its best.

The attorney general of Massachusetts looked at it and saw a crime. In a stiff letter to Whole Foods last week, Attorney General Thomas Reilly noted that under Chapter 136 of the Massachusetts legal code, ''the performance of work on legal holidays is prohibited, unless permitted by a statutory exemption." If Whole Foods opened its doors on Thanksgiving, the letter warned, it could face ''criminal and equitable enforcement actions to enjoin violations of the Blue Laws."

Ah, yes, the blue laws -- those rules and regulations imposed by New England's 17th-century Puritan theocrats to govern moral conduct and ensure proper observance of the Sabbath. The product of an era when ''witches" were hanged, blue laws dictated what people could wear, forbade travel on Sunday, and made it an offense to miss church. The Puritans ''carried their efforts to control private activities in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to extremes unknown elsewhere," notes the Family Encyclopedia of American History. For example, church doors were bolted during Sunday services to prevent restless congregants from leaving early.

As nonsensical as the Attorney General's demands are it appears that the Whole Foods had no choice but to comply.

I must admit to being somewhat ignorant about the ways and customs of the Puritans. They are, in my opinion, not all that dissimilar from those of the Taliban. Not that the ways of Taliban - or at least their way of thinking - are all that foreign to the American political thinking.

To conclude this, let me wish everybody a happy Thanksgiving. And I also believe that the citizens of Massachusetts must repeal what remains of the "Blue Laws" and regain their freedom on this day of happy feasting.

tags: puritans  thanksgiving  crime  law