Wine & Sensorship

It is fact, that when a people are controlled by the heavy hand of government, the tighter the grip of the government, the more dissidents slip through the cracks.

Freedom, in all its forms, are rights granted by nature to man. That being said man has put in place some basic rules by which to live. Easy to read and understand, without gray areas clouded in confusion. Don't steal, kill, lie, cheat, honor your elders and keep a day sacred for quiet prayer & meditation. Sound familiar, a guy named Moses brought them to us centuries ago. Our founding fathers felt the need to extend this thought to speech, worship, assembly, and taxes. The latter is still a point of contention between our Government and the people. After that the rest is just minutia tied up in legal litigation by some that would assume to know better than the rest of us concerning what is wrong or right.

So when the ABC in Alabama proclaimed a certain wine label as pornographic, the uproar in the various social markets was quite comedic. I began to wonder if anyone took notice of the uproar in Tehran over their seemingly stolen election. This is what happens when a government goes unchecked. Not that a wine label would cause calamity and protests in the streets, but where is the line drawn next? The Alabama ABC should be taken to task on this issue if for no other reason than for freedom of expression, and in comparison to all the sexually explicit ad's one sees in the marketplace, this is vanilla.

(By the way the best line I've heard yet is the direct relationship between this label, the UK study about Women and Red wine and the concern over the increase in Lesbian affairs. Too funny.)

The winery will most likely see an increase in sales of this wine. Hell, a good capitalist would go to town on T-shirts, bumper stickers and bicycle pumps in the shape of a wine bottle. It may now be left to the courts should the winery or merchants or people of Alabama, or a grassroots civil liberty organization care to take up the cause in defense of the people and freedom of expression. We should always remember that freedom is never granted by a govenment, it is won through the vigilance of those who would seek to be free. And every issue that would seek to control what a society reads, sees, experiences, and appreciates should be challenged vigilantly.