Permanent Change: Big Retailers Close for Thanksgiving Again, Employees AND Customers Happy

I have no issues over the practice of resting one day in seven. A biologist studying beavers actually found that they tend to not work on Saturdays. Very strange! I am, however, flatly opposed to “Sunday Laws” or Blue Laws which mandate that everyone take off the same day. Closing for a day of rest works. A friend who owns a Dairy Queen in Austin shuts down his restaurant from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Turns out he had the highest grossing DQ in the Austin area.
My chief concern is the phrase in the 4th commandment – six days shalt thou labor. What gets over-looked in making it law that you have to close specifically on Sundays, is that for some of us, it prevents us from obeying the six days shalt thou labor bit. Millions of Americans embrace a faith that forbids work on other days beside Sunday. Jews, Seventh-day Adventists, Messianic Jews, Seventh-day Baptists and Worldwide Church of God take their rest day off on Saturday (see the Calendar). They close their businesses or don’t work at jobs that require Saturday work. If you also legally forbid Sunday work too, you remove not one day from the work week, but two.
In Europe several countries now have pretty strictly enforced Blue Laws. In Germany you can receive a hefty fine if you wash your car in your own driveway or mow your own lawn in addition to opening your shop or plowing your land. These laws were pushed by a coalition of Protestant organizations, political parties, trade unions and the Roman Catholic Church who all got together to sponsor this “great idea.”
The trouble with such laws is that if Saturday is your day of rest, as it is for tens of millions of people, then you cannot obey the Old Testament command “Six days shalt thou labor.” It’s all well and good to forgo profit on one day of the weekend, but Blue Laws punish Sabbath-keepers by keeping them from earning a living all weekend long.
I applaud Chik-fil-A for their adherence to their beliefs and to Target and Walmart, et al for closing on Thanksgiving and other quasi-religious holidays like Christmas and Easter. That’s nice. It doesn’t hurt leftists or atheists who celebrate it as Kwanzaa or Generic December Holiday, Friendsgiving or Spring Solstice to take the same day off as everybody else. They may do as they like so long as the federal government makes no law establishing a state religion (which Blue Laws kind of do).
If the point of specifying Sunday is creating some kind of restful atmosphere, don’t worry. Sabbath keepers will be respectful and do their business quietly on Sunday, Something Antifa is not likely to allow if we close up on Saturday, especially since the Seventh-day Sabbath’s origin is clearly Jewish and they don’t particularly like Semite practices.
Anyway, thanks for your attention. Some of my fellow believers get freaked out when we talk Blue Laws. In the last century a lot of Adventists, particularly farmers did jail time for plowing their fields on Sunday in obedience to the “six days shalt thou labor,” thing. Hope you guys understand. The principle is grand, but not as a law with penalties. It wasn’t right when we used to do it and isn’t a good idea for the future.
Tom King

Actually Scott, I kind of like the idea of “Green Friday”. It’s a good way to subtly push into the vernacular to assocaite any “Green” initiatives with money, or more simply, greed