Sumptuary laws governing the ornateness of dress and governing general diet can be traced back to the Greek and Roman legal orders; with the rise of the Sabbatarian movements in Europe, laws regulating work and recreation on Sundays were promulgated. When the theocratic New England colonies were founded in the 17th century, they brought these traditions and multiplied them in the spirit of Puritan piety, creating blue laws, so named for the blue paper on which they were printed in New Haven.
In the intervening years, despite a revival during 20th century Prohibition, the blue laws have been in decline. They are seen as outmoded, and indeed, the point is well taken-in our pluralistic society, the choice to practice a religion celebrating its Sabbath on a day other than Sunday, as well as the choice not to practice any religion at all, must be recognized and legitimated. What's more, the blue laws occupy that strange region of the law prohibiting transactions normally legal between consenting parties and against all concern for economic efficiency. As such, blue laws have no place in our modern legal order.
Or is that actually true? Blue laws exist to guard the public morality of the citizenry. In the 17th century, there was a strong consensus that a failure to punish the biblical offense of desecrating the Sabbath would bring divine wrath down upon the collective community; today, we have no such consensus concerning Sabbath observance and so blue laws are rightfully deprecated. But were such a consensus again to arise, particularly in a secular formulation so as not to offend the First Amendment, then blue laws might very well be again justified.
Behold, we indeed do have such a consensus: drinking. Alcohol consumption at the College is not just a recreational pursuit; it has quite nearly risen to the level of religion here. Though conventional religions are struggling to appeal to our studentry, binge drinking is not only alive and well but indeed flourishing on our campus. Be it in the officially sanctioned and funded collegiate events of TAP or the private soirees put on by our strapping young men on the several athletic teams and fraternities, Saturday night means alcohol. If there is one thing that unites the entire Amherst community, it is that every man, woman and child spends Saturday night worshiping the porcelain gods of our bathroom facilities.
How aghast I was, therefore, to learn that some students in our midst would instead spend Saturday nights engaging in academic pursuits! They would have the nerve to squirrel themselves away in a nook of the college library reading Proust or Foucault instead of paying for their college tenure in the brain. Alcohol is the bond that ties us, and the college library, come Saturday night, is the rusty pruning shears that would sever our bonds and cast us on the seas of anarchy like so much flotsam.
If we are to retain our ranking as the number one liberal arts institution in the nation, then we must not shirk from our duty to uphold the foremost liberal-arts tradition of alcoholism. To do otherwise would be to make a fraud of the prominence of alcoholism in every campus tour our college offers to prospective students. If you can look a pre-frosh in the eye and baldly tell him: "I have misled you; the Amherst experience is one of education, not inebriation," then you are an individual of the basest morality and vilest countenance and have no place in our community.
An 11 p.m. closing time for our college library is the blue law of our day. By frustrating any attempt of academic achievement on Saturday nights, we ensure that every student is left with no recourse but to drink, thereby ensuring that the social and moral order we hold most dear must prevail against those who would undermine it. To extend those hours would be to spit on the grave of Lord Jeffery Amherst and all that he stood for.
Thank you.