18th Amendment and Billy Sunday

When enough states approved the 18th Amendment, Billy Sunday declared: "The rain of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory; we will turn our prisons into factories, our jails into storehouses and corn cribs, our men will walk upright. Now women will smile, children will laugh, hell will be for rent." Savage Peace, Ann Hagedorn, p.50

This foolish pronouncement could come only from the lips of a perverse moralist (which Sunday was), attributing to a single cause (alcohol) all that's wrong, and believing that prohibition would usher in a new era, if not heaven itself. Such is the foolishness of moralists, and how wrong they are. Sunday, meanwhile ignored the call of women for suffrage, anti-Semitism, lynchings and the on-going cruelty of Capital and its war against the workers of America.

Can only hope contemporary moralists could learn a lesson from this - to pay attention to the real issues facing America (greed, racism, poverty, jobs, school funding, war, environment, universal health care) rather than the illusory issues of a woman's right to health choice and marriage equality for LGBTQ persons.