Dumb Laws

Most of us at some point have stumbled over to DumbLaws.com or at least heard snippets of its content. The website exists not for any informative reason, but instead to entertain us. We see these arcane laws as reflections of a quaint time in our nation’s past. It amuses us to discover that such laws could ever be enforced or even enacted. But should the appropriate response be humor? Is something more insidious present in these laws than mere naivety? And why do we so easily laugh at past legislation without blinking an eye at our current laws?

Consider some of these ludicrous examples:
- Dominos may not be played on Sunday.
- It is illegal to sell peanuts in Lee county after sundown on Wednesday.
- It is illegal for a driver to be blindfolded while operating a vehicle.
- Motorized vehicles are not to be sold on Sundays.
- If you’ve been convicted of drinking and driving you may not apply for personalized license plates.
- You may not slurp your soup.

After reading through some examples one begins to notice a few trends which we may generalize. The laws attempt to legislate morality, are too specific and clearly reactionary, or involve the state trying to protect us from ourselves (really just a subset of legislating morality). What we laugh off as dumb laws we should really despise as tyrannical laws. In all of these cases we see a legislature reaching beyond its proper functions. The humor comes easily when they’re viewed as relics of the past, but we must be open to the reality that people were prosecuted under such laws. The gentlemen handed fines and subject to court appearances for slurping their soup would hardly find the law to be humorous.

It may seem silly to refer to such seemingly minor laws as tyrannical. Surely, the punishments for such infractions were not debilitating and were seldom enforced even that the time of their passage. However, we should not stay our outrage on those grounds. Minor injustices are still injustices. Further, dumb laws leave the door ajar for seriously despotic laws to arise. Once legislatures claim the ability to impose their morality and way of life upon us in principle, they will not hesitate to do so in action. Our overseers forbid us to sell automobiles on Sunday to keep their Sabbath holy, and we begrudgingly accept without serious complaint. When we do so, we accept their premises and give validation to their methods. Then we stand flabbergasted as violent video games are swept from store shelves and homosexuals are forbidden from entering into marriage. We must realize that the acceptance of one leads to inception of the other.

What then are the dumb laws of our age? I’m amazed at the hypocrisy of our elected officials who would scoff at the laws in the DumbLaws.com archives and turn the next day to vote against medicinal marijuana. The great body of laws forbidding personal drug use constitute the dumbest of the dumb laws we’re forced to abide by today. We suffer through the needless prosecution of these laws which will one day be laughed at as relics of a past, simpler, society. I hope however the situation is slightly different. I hope that instead of humor our descendents look upon them with disgust. Instead of laughing their blood should boil at the audacity of a government drunk on power, subjugating its people to slavery under meaningless, unjust laws. I hope that they remember the billions of dollars spent, the thousands of lives lost, and the hundreds of thousands of poor souls who had to rot in prison or pay a fine just to feed the appetite of a legislature’s bloody crusade for their morality.

To all of the victims of dumb laws past, present, and future, I’m not laughing.