“State-Owned Liquor Stores, Entertainment Districts, Payday Loans and Overcrowded State Prisons”

Published 12:42 pm Tuesday, April 7, 2015

ALLEN FARLEY / GUEST COLUMNIST
The other day I watched a movie on a Christian television channel about “Noah’s Ark & The Flood.” It really got me thinking. (You know, God will use the technology he gave us to convict our hearts).
The Noah’s Ark movie made me recall some of the issues being discussed in the Alabama State House over the last few weeks:
• Alabama has the most overcrowded state prisons in the nation.
• About 80 percent of Alabama’s prison population was involved in alcohol and/or drug abuse prior to going to prison.
• The State of Alabama operates 176 state-owned liquor stores that bring in approximately $200 million each year.
• President Obama recently stated that Jefferson County, (Home to approximately one-third of Alabama’s prison population), has four-times more Payday Loan Establishments than we have McDonald restaurants.
• There is local legislation currently being advertised that would create “Entertainment Districts” in the cities of Vestavia Hills and Hoover. The legislation would allow those two cities, (located in Jefferson and Shelby Counties), to “establish no more than three entertainment districts within their respective city permitting consumption of alcoholic beverages purchased from on-premise licensees to be consumed by purchasers anywhere within the entertainment districts.”

Listen, is that thunder?……………………

Matthew 24:37-39 “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. (38) For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; (39) and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away.  That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.”

God Bless America!!!

Allen Farley represents portions of Jefferson and Shelby Counties in Alabama’s House District 15. Representative Farley can be contacted at allenfarley@bellsouth.net, or 960-7526.