Now and then an oddball law makes the news, like the one that has allowed local movie theaters that serve food to also offer beer and wine—just like restaurants do.
For nearly 30 years, theaters like the Magic Lantern in Ketchum have offered beer and wine for sale to moviegoers of legal age. It was all very legal and licensed.
However, theaters have suddenly been caught in a dilemma not of their doing, but because of a new interpretation of a state licensing law by the Idaho State Police.
The ISP maintains that a state law doesn't recognize a movie theater's right to sell beer and wine.
ISP has newly concluded that theaters aren't covered by a law allowing beer and wine sales because darkened theaters where under-age drinking could be under way are tough to police because they're darkened.
For theaters to be the target of a law never enforced against them in three decades with no indication of any local violations is at the very least a puzzling contradiction, probably an injustice.
Suddenly deciding to enforcing a law on a flimsy rationale—that movie theaters are too dark to police for illegal drinking—is a law surely headed for change. Little wonder it hasn't been enforced all this time.
The ISP—already stretched for time and money—is putting in precious time to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
If all theater owners in the same fix are licensed, and clearly haven't broken any laws involving serving minors, they shouldn't be penalized from conducting their licensed businesses.
