As for your bigotry or lack thereof, here’s what you said:  “The Economist, a fairly conservative English magazine, referred to the GOP as the “stupid party” just last week.  Posts like this one do little to shed that unfortunate image…”  Since you took it from “party” to “my post,” I somehow got the sense you thought I was stupid for holding Republican views.  Get it?

And you’re smart enough, dg, to not call this stupid.  The premise of Schweikart’s book is that leftist historians are pursuing revisionist history; it is not his purpose to re-present that revisionism, but only to disprove it.  He does present the revision position briefly at the start of each chapter and I don’t generally pick up these portions of the book in my reviews.  That said, given the shameful management of the 2008 campaign, I can’t disagree with the Economist’s statement about the Republican PARTY – but be careful if you extrapolate that to all Republicans, dg, or your bigotry will be showing.

Criminologists Edwin Sutherland and C.H. Gehlke found “no evidence here of a ‘crime wave,’ but only of a slowly rising level,” – and that was in urban areas only, and NOT adjusted for population increases.  The homicide rate rose steadily from 1910, before Prohibition, plateaued in the late 20s and did not begin dropping until 1936, three years after Prohibition ended.  Still, by definition crime had to increase because a whole new type of crime – liquor-related – was on the books.

As for consumption, Schweikart shows that slightly less alcohol was consumed per capita in America at the end of Prohibition than before – hardly a sterling endorsement, but a rebuttal of sorts to your point, although I agree that thousands of people started drinking because of the added thrill of Prohibition.  It’s just that a few thousand more apparently quit.

Prohibition was repealed primarily because the media railed against it and because the liquor industry lobbied heavily for its repeal.  Technically speaking, the liquor industry was a criminal element because of Prohibition, but it was they, not the “gangland warlords,” that primarily funded the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, which led the battle for repeal.

The only relationship between liquor and abortion that I made was stating that professors make an association between Prohibition and efforts to end “choice.”  Otherwise, I couldn’t agree more with that portion of your comment.

I make this defense as no defender of Prohibition; I’m not.  I’m just summarizing Schweikart’s very interesting and important book.