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Show Sabbath Hypocricy Under the heading, "Sunday Fisherman Fish-erman Gets Twenty-five Days in Jail," the United Press recently carried a story about Robert Miller, a seventeen year-old boy who was caught fishing on Sunday near the civilized town of L ck Haven, Pa., and sentenced to twenty-five days in the lockup. He was violating Pennsylvania's antiquated anti-quated blue laws. "I hadn't even had a bite," the lad lamented a3 he was led away to ail. If there are any Good Women of the Friday Morning Club reading this editorial, sweet Purtanic creatures whose chief pleasure is minding other people's business, I suggest that they stop reading right at this point. It is possible that I am alone in my indignation at the wave of snooping, petty, tyrf-.nical legislation that infests this country. But I think not. Most sportsmen are individualists. If they didn't love freedom if they weren't more than ordinarily independent and fair-minded they wouldn't be American sportsmen. I wSnt to ask these sportsmen what they think about laws that will send a boy to jail for fishing on Sunday about laws against hunting on Sunday Sun-day about anti-firearms laws and the whole pestiferous mess of anti-laws anti-laws that stupid and hypocritical busy-bodies busy-bodies are foisting on Americans that are allegedly free, white and twenty-one. twenty-one. Do you think that the commandment, command-ment, "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy," means that healthy, clean recreations like hunting and fishing are outlawed by the command of God, in order to make Sunday safe for tea-drinking gossips and their holier-than-thou pleasures? By what law of reason is it right and just in the eyes of God and the commonwealth that fishing should be any more wrong on Sunday than walking or eating cake, or riding in automobiles? The notion thai God who made Nature beautiful as a reflection of His glory at the same time set aside our one non-working day of the week as a penitential period of Etygian gloom, a period in which one should scowl at the beaming face of Nature, a period peri-od in which nothing is permissible except ex-cept what will make one unhappy, is a hangover idea from the last days of Puritanic obsession. It has no place in modern America any more than it has a place in any common-sense, normal scheme of thinking. Perhaps you don't realize how many states have these blue laws that are intended to keep you from going hunting hunt-ing and fishing on Sunday. Pennsylvania Penn-sylvania has incorporated into its game laws regulations against both hunting and fishing on Sundays. In Virginia you can not "shoot any game on Sunday." In West Virginia you are liable xo a fine of $100 and a jail sentence of 100 days for hunting on Sunday. In Maryland it is "unlawful to hunt any game on Sundays or when the ground is covered with snow" In Delaware on Sunday you can't hunt "any birds or animals whatsoever." whatsoev-er." In New Jersey it is unlawful "to carry a gun in the woods or fields or on the water? on the Sabbath day." Georgia allows no Sunday fishing. Maine prohibits Sunday hunting. In Michigan certain counties are closed to Sunday hunting. In Oklahoma you can't shoot aquail on Sunday, and in Kansas you can't kill anything on Sunday. So it goes. What surprises me is that Americans of the twentieth century, cen-tury, who thinks of the Middle Ages as times of suppression and serfdom, will supinely tolerate restrictions on their freedom that would make the bushwhackers of the fifteenth century snicker up their doublets. The worst aspect of these laws is that they prohibit pro-hibit health-giving and harmless recreations rec-reations on the only day on which working people can hope to fully enjoy en-joy them. Plutocrats and loungers alone have sufficient leisure to hunt and fish whenever they please. Most of us have to work hard on week days, and surely we have a reasonable God-given God-given right to "keep holy the Sabbaih |