It looks like Maryland neo-prohibitionists are on the march again. Apparently not content with a statewide smoking ban that will go into effect next February, at least one lawmaker is now preparing to wage an assault on our beer and wine too. Or more specifically, on how we can acquire it: Charles County Commissioners President Wayne Cooper has drafted legislation proposing a ban on drive-up windows at liquor stores.
“When I first moved here,” Cooper said in a recent Washington Post interview, “a lot of our bars were topless and massage parlors were everywhere, and I saw these drive-through liquor stores, and I thought, ‘Wow, what kind of county have I moved to?’…It certainly portrays a negative image of Charles County.”
Wow, indeed. While I believe the government has no moral right to prohibit the consumption of adult pornography and prostitution, I guess I’ve just never placed those things in the same category as alcohol.
Though Cooper claims to appreciate the service drive-through liquor stores provide, his problem seems to be that “We’re telling people not to drink and drive, but we’re making it convenient to do so.”
Actually, cars — not politicians — make it convenient to drink and drive, but I digress. Maybe this is an appropriate time to point out that politicians shouldn’t be telling us not to drink and drive in the first place; that the state should not be using alcohol as an excuse to confiscate our property in order to finance nefarious sobriety checkpoints, where government agents round up and harass motorists collectively simply because they have the potential to be driving under the influence. You know our civil liberties are in jeopardy when merely moving about qualifies as probable cause these days.
Because I assume Mr. Cooper is intelligent enough to realize there’s no meaningful difference between walking into a liquor store and driving up to a window to purchase alcohol, I suspect he’s actually more concerned about asserting his influence to grant political favors (to windowless liquor store owners, perhaps?) than making us get out of our cars to buy booze. Either that or he’s seeking to use his office to impose some personal opposition to alcohol on everyone else.
Regardless, if Mr. Cooper truly can’t stand the “image” being generated by certain business dealings occurring among the many peaceful, consenting, tax-paying adults of Charles County, he is free to leave it. What he does not have moral license to do is employ the coercive power of government to prevent liquor store owners from providing a service harming no one.
Moreover, because Charles County operates under what is called Code Home Rule, Cooper’s bill will require approval from the Maryland General Assembly should his commissioner colleagues vote unanimously to approve it. This means that the bill potentially holds more far-reaching implications than might otherwise be assumed on the surface, as the need for state endorsement necessarily increases the risk that, if passed, the ban would be imposed throughout Maryland instead of on a single county — effectively usurping the freedom of all Maryland residents to move to a more liquor-friendly district within