Talk:Blue Laws
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Blue Laws as opposed to a Blue law, are distinctly different.
"Blue Laws" generally refer to the Blue Laws of Connecticut, and a "Blue law" is a general term that may refer to other such laws.
WB2 08:12, 29 May 2005 (UTC)
Number 43 ("No man shall a maid...")appears to be missing a verb after "shall".
[edit] Copyedit
The first three paragraphs of this article desperately need a copyedit verging on complete rewrite; the actual list of the laws should be transwikied to Wikisource. I haven't got time to do this right now; I'll come back and do it later if nobody else gets to it first. -Polonius 13:44, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Questioning the dating of the laws
The sources of the listed laws seem to be distressingly unclear.
The article cites statues set up in 1655 for the New Haven Colony, and also says that they were almost entirely copied from the existing Code of 1650 that the Colony of Connecticut had already drafted. The third paragraph states that although 'these "laws" were not actually put into draft, their existence can be inferred from similar laws ... borrowed from codes that already been adopted by adjacent colonies, such as the anti-papal or anti-Quaker codes of Virginia and New York."
I'm questioning this because the term "Quaker" is recorded by George Fox (generally considered the founder of "Quakerism") as first being used in England by Justice Bennet of Derby in 1650.
John Punshon, contemporary Quaker scholar, notes in his book Portrait in Gray, published by the Quaker Home Service in London, copyright 1984, that Boston, Massachusetts, first made Quakerism a capital crime in 1658.
Can some one undertake the chore of sorting out which sources, and their dates, support which of these blue laws? Or maybe it should just be emphasized that the listed laws are a compendium, and don't correspond to one particular set of codes.
Lucy Price A Quaker
PS. I actually have a Wiki account, but I've just moved and can't find my account name or password!
