We've just come across a fairly decent editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune, regarding a topic which we ranted about here on Weber County Forum only last week:
• Club OrwellAnd for the record, we really don't care whether our legislature ever gets around to abolishing our Utah Prohibition Legal Workaround. From our own viewpoint, although the club membership process seems a mite silly, we don't find it overly intrusive. And from the point of view of the many out-of-state visitors we've talked with about this, it does add a certain cloak and dagger "aura" to a visit to our very unique state... something akin to patronizing a "speakeasy" during the American Prohibition Experiment... or an American hotel bar in a strict Muslim nation. Surely that adds something special to the Utah tourist experience, right?
And whether the minor inconvenience of signing up for a club membership truly operates as a deterrent to Utah tourism we do not know. We won't necessarily take Governor Huntsman's word for it. Speaking however as a self-interested, avid skier, who really enjoys that great untracked Utah powder, we're not sure that such deterrence is an entirely bad thing at all [wink-wink-nod-nod].
What really irks us about the proposed new liquor control system, of course, i.e., the creation of a state operated central database to store the personal information of even the most infrequent "sinners," is that the idea is straight out of George Orwell, alright, as the SLTrib editorial suggests. So once again we ask the question, adopting the succinct and colloquial phrasing of one of the readers in the comments section below last Friday's editorial:
For a state with an overwhelming "get government out of my private life" Republicans, I find it highly hypocritical the way they seem to nose their way in to the private lives of any one and everyone they don't agree with. Will adulthood EVER be legal in Utah(?)Yeah.. What's up with THAT, O my "limited government" GOP Brothers and Sisters?
Who will be the first to comment?
