The efforts of the Utah Legislature to exempt our state's liquor laws from the realm of common sense — if not from the Constitution of the United States — have taken yet another absurd turn.

It makes the state look stupid, though it may provide some amusement for customers waiting for their tables at the Cheesecake Factory restaurant to be built in the downtown City Creek Center.

Liquor-serving restaurants licensed after January 2010 must, by Utah law, conceal their bartenders behind a screen that has come to be dubbed the Zion Curtain. The idea is that minors and others too weak to otherwise resist the lure of Demon Rum might crack were they able to actually witness the intercourse of gin and vermouth.

But, like many national restaurant chains, Cheesecake Factory has a standard template for its establishments, and this brand's floor plan includes a sizable, and unscreened, bar area. Sizable enough, apparently, that Cheesecake Factory was an example of unacceptable behavior used by those pushing the see-no-evil statute. (Perhaps it should be granted that the dissonance of an eatery named after a dessert also featuring a significant area for adult beverages might have upset the Prohibitionists who rule the Legislature and encouraged this particular irrational act.)

With last week's announcement that Cheesecake Factory had made the eminently sensible decision to place a restaurant in the $1.5 billion downtown business and residential hub came word that the new location would not vary from the company's standard design. Managers would accommodate Utah law by stocking their cookie-cutter (another incongruous dessert reference) bar area with unopened liquor bottles, just for show, while the actual concoction of cocktails would take place out of public view.

Call it a Potemkin bar. After the Russian nobleman who, according to legend, built phony villages in parts of the Russian Empire to show the visiting Empress Catherine the Great town after town of happy and prosperous peasants, and thus conceal the truth of their squalid and violent lives.

This legal silliness is the result of a stack of U.S. Supreme Court and Appeals Court rulings holding that the 21st Amendment's grant of liquor regulator authority to the states does not trump the First Amendment's freedom of speech.

So those who legally and without deception sell liquor may, no matter what the Legislature says, advertise that fact by, say, printing menus, posting signs or filling a wall with bottles of liquor and wine that, sadly, will never be opened.