Sabbath blabbath
Project 2025 even wants to reimpose the sabbath on us. Annie Laurie Gaylor has the details:
Today, we take for granted that you can do many of the things on Sunday that you can do on other days, perhaps reduced hours notwithstanding. Will this still be the case if Project 2025 becomes a reality? Not if the Heritage Foundation gets its way. Let’s turn to page 589 of Project 2025, to a subsection titled “Sabbath Rest.”
“God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest, and until very recently the Judeo-Christian tradition sought to honor that mandate by moral and legal regulation of work on that day,” states the document. “Moreover, a shared day off makes it possible for families and communities to enjoy time off together, rather than as atomized individuals, and provides a healthier cadence of life for everyone. Unfortunately, the communal day of rest has eroded under the pressures of consumerism and secularism, especially for low-income workers.”
Project 2025 assures us that churches, naturally, would, in most instances, be exempt from this rule! It pretends to care about workers, but clearly the real goal is to get more bodies back into churches because of less competition.
The document continues: “That day would default to Sunday, except for employers with a sincere religious observance of a Sabbath at a different time (e.g., Friday sundown to Saturday sundown); the obligation would transfer to that period instead.”
The project calls for Congress to encourage “communal rest” (sounds kinky!), by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act to require time-and-a half pay for working on “the Sabbath” regardless of whether someone is truly working overtime. It concedes this would “lead to higher costs and limited access to goods and services and reduce work available on the Sabbath,” but after all, “the proper role of government in helping to enable individuals to practice their religion is to reduce barriers to work options and to fruitful employer and employee relations.”
Like hell it is.
My college experience in the Boston area included bristling at the blue laws, on their way out but with some vestiges remaining. I was used to Sunday being almost exactly like any other day, but it definitely was not, not in Boston.
A college friend of mine, an evangelical Christian, complained that, in his home town in Mississippi, everybody went to church together, and went out to lunch together, but in Boston, Sunday is just like any other day. Um, no, it isn’t, but it should be.
Some places already give time and a half for Sundays; at least one person I know who worked in health care got time and a half every Sunday he worked. Not being Christian, he made a point of working every Sunday he could get scheduled.
If they don’t make it a paid day off for those low-income workers, they are doing them no favors. I hated Sunday when I was hourly at a job with a business that didn’t work Sundays or holidays.
@Sackbut,
I remember my father being upset when they began to allow Sunday shopping in Massachusetts. Not for any religious reason–he was an atheist–but because he hated shopping.
What always struck me as odd in Mass was that liquor stores were closed on Sundays, but bars were open. I guess those are akin to religious institutions, though (and of course you could always pop over the NH border to get booze if you needed it).
I’d understood that they wanted to destroy OT… Apparently not in all circumstances.
They did move the sabbath from Saturday to Sunday (and in fact in some languages, such as Spanish, Saturday is still call the sabbath (sábado)).
I wonder what ‘pressures’ they imagine are imposed by secularism. Seems to me that it would only reduce pressures, being that it frees people from bullshit like a mandatory sabbath.
Exodus 2:18 (KJV): “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
Perhaps we should be thankful for small mercies. Not even the Bible-thumping fundamentalists around Salem, Mass. are trying to revive that..
Well, not to my knowledge, anyway.
Puts me in mind of the stricter orthodox sabbath rules… no one is to do any work on the sabbath, including not only paid work but unpaid labour of household chores, which may work great if you’re a man who (naturally, duh) isn’t expected to handle any cooking or cleaning or childcare… Not so great for women who end up having to work extra on Fridays to make up for the prohibition.
You want to impose your silly religion on me? You can pay me for my inconvenience, thanks.