Prohibition, Bush43 and the Religious Right

From Wikipedia:

In the history of the United States, Prohibition is the period from 1920 to 1933, during which the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol for consumption were banned nationally as mandated in the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Prohibition of alcohol can also refer to the antecedent religious and political temperance movements calling for sumptuary laws to end or encumber alcohol use.
Following significant pressure on lawmakers as a result of the temperance movement, the United States Senate proposed the Eighteenth Amendment on December 18, 1917. The 18th Amendment was certified as ratified on January 16, 1919, having been approved by 36 states, and went into effect on January 16, 1920. Some state legislatures had already enacted statewide prohibition prior to the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment.
The "Volstead Act," the popular name for the National Prohibition Act, passed Congress over President Woodrow Wilson's veto on October 28, 1919 and established the legal definition of intoxicating liquor as well as providing for enforcement of Prohibition.
As Prohibition became increasingly unpopular during the Great Depression, especially in large cities, repeal was eagerly anticipated. On March 23, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law an amendment to the Volstead Act known as the Cullen-Harrison Act, allowing the manufacture and sale of certain kinds of alcoholic beverages.
The Eighteenth Amendment was repealed with ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, on December 5, 1933.

From the above and from the 12 year interregnum that the Republican Party enjoyed from 1994 to 2006 it appears that the Religious Right can pop up from time to time to really screw things up in the religion-crazy United States of America but their grip is short-lived and ends as soon as the damage done becomes crystal clear.

Prohibition ushered in a period of lawlessness unprecedented and its lasting legacy was the beginning of organized crime. Crime as such always existed but the unlawful activities of highly organized, disciplined associations managed with the same principles of legitimate businesses on a transnational scale got its start in the business-crazy, anything-goes-for- money United States of the 1920's with alcohol the catalyst. Once the genie is out of the bottle anyone can follow...

The 1994-2006 interregnum of the Republican Party aided and abetted by the Religious Right produced wars with no end and a general collapse of the world economies from which who knows what the outcome and the lasting legacy will be.

We should then be very vigilant for the next occasion when the Religious Right could rise once more to do its nefarious deeds.