Drinks for the house!

Brazoria County voted "wet" today.

So you'll be a able to get a drink containing alcohol in a lot more restaurants without having to buy (for a modest fee) a club membership, and also buy beer and wine in some of our more conservative-thinkin locations.

The vote wasn't close on the two proposals to allow the sale of beer and wine to drink "off-premise" and the sale of mixed beverages in restaurants by certificate holders. (The margin on both issues was roughly 70 percent "for" and 30 percent "agin.")

Thus ends a long history of booze battles in Brazoria County dating back to 1919 when county voters favored Prohibition (728 for to 630 agin) to 1933 when the county voted for the sale of beer containing "not more than three and two tenths per centum
(3.2%) of alcohol by weight” (1437 for to 735 agin.)

Since then, voters in various locales waged pitched battles to either ban alcohol or allow it, with the end result being a patchwork of different laws and general confusion to visitors who wondered why you could, say, buy beer in one town and not another.

So does liberalizing the drinkin laws mean more people are gonna fall prey to demon rum?

Hell, how are we supposed to know? But we're not necessarily convinced of that. If you're gonna drink, you'll find a way to get it, we figure.

It might mean that a city like Lake Jackson may be able to attract some more upscale chain-type restaurants, we've heard, but we have no idea if that's true or not. That's be good for sales tax receipts. Hey, and then they could lower the tax rate (HO-Ho-HO....)

We guess, overall, the booze vote means Brazoria County isn't as "conservative" moral-wise as it once was. But there are still lot of rednecks around here, that's for damn sure.