A Stitch in Haste

How jealous American theocrats must feel over this:

The Croatian parliament has passed a law forcing shops to close on Sundays in a concession to the Roman Catholic church.

The church has campaigned for years for Sundays to be devoted to family or Mass in Croatia, which is almost 90 percent Roman Catholic. But Croatians have begun spending weekends in shopping malls that have flourished across the country in the past few years and remain open seven days a week.

Here we see a classic example of “will of the majority” nonsense. It doesn’t matter whether Croatia is “almost 90 percent Roman Catholic” or “over 99.999 percent Roman Catholic.” So long as two competent consenting adults wish to engage in a private commercial transaction on their own private property, they have a natural — dare one say “God-given”? — right to do so. The majority be damned (figuratively or literally, depending on your particular belief system).

Incidentally, if “almost 90 percent” of Croatians are Roman Catholic, then wouldn’t a fair guess be that around 90 percent of Croatian business owners are also Roman Catholic? Shouldn’t they already be closing their stores on Sunday, without any coercion from the state? Or is the whole point of this theocratic abomination to bring forth a little remedial help on the whole “Third Commandment”* concept? (*Third for Roman Catholics and Lutherans; Fourth for Jews and other Christians.)

Meanwhile, one of course cannot be a good Catholic without celebrating the Sacred Feast of the Immaculate Hypocrisy:

The law … allows Sunday shopping over the summer and Christmas holidays.

Infringing individual rights in order to foster (i.e., coerce) proper (i.e., mindless) Catholic obedience is all-important. Except during Christmas.

Now that’s what I call an epiphany.