The commentary I’m about to share from The Washington Post hits close to home because my friend’s parents used to do stuff like this. They knew we were going to drink anyway, so they told us to keep it in the house and they’d supervise it. Sure, they could tell us not to, but unless you want to follow your kid around every single moment of the day, you’re fooling yourself.

Personally, I always thought it was a very responsible thing to do. The fact of the matter is, under their supervision, nobody ever got drunk and we all had fun playing video games, swimming in the pool, etc. Also, nobody left the house that night. Everybody stayed over. That was the rule.

So when a Virginia couple gets sentenced to EIGHT years for doing the same thing, my BS detector goes off. Sure, we have to respect the laws, but these parents made a choice I feel Solomon would respect. Either their kid can go off on his 16th birthday and drink at somebody else’s house under no supervision and possibly drive home under the influence or they can host a party where only beer is available and make sure their son and their son’s friends are acting responsibly with alcohol.

Thankfully, their sentences were reduced to 27 months, and I hope further appeals reduce them to “time served”, but consider what this means. The courts are actually going to take both parents away from their child for only one instance of questionable judgment. And I bet if you polled the nation’s parents an overwhelmingly majority of parents would agree with doing the same thing.

And let’s take it to an extreme for a moment. Should a parent be charged with giving alcohol to a minor if they allow their kid to have a glass of wine with Thanksgiving dinner? Or how about just Sunday dinner? Or how about a beer after a mowing the lawn with dad? You can see where I’m going with this, but if decisions like the one I’ve just mentioned stand, that’s where we could be headed.

In any event, the following editorial from Radley Balko does a better job of talking about zero tolerance and how we’re beginning to look more and more like some sort of weird police state.

Not only do such uncompromising approaches do little to make our roads safer, they often make them worse. The data don’t lie. High school kids drink, particularly during prom season. We might not be comfortable with that, but it’s going to happen. It always has. The question, then, is do we want them drinking in their cars, in parking lots, in vacant lots and in rented motel rooms? Or do we want them drinking at parties with adult supervision, where they’re denied access to the roads once they enter?

The Virginia case mentioned above is troubling for another reason: The cops raided that home without a search warrant. This is becoming more and more common in jurisdictions with particularly militant approaches to underage drinking. A prosecutor in Wisconsin popularized the practice in the late 1990s when he authorized deputies to enter private residences without warrants, “by force, if necessary,” when there was the slightest suspicion of underage drinking. For such “innovative” approaches, Paul Bucher won plaudits from Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which awarded him a place in the “Prosecutors as Partners” honor roll on the MADD Web site.

The Post reported a while back on a party in Bethesda in which there was no underage drinking at all. Police approached the parents at a backyard graduation party and asked if they could administer breath tests to underage guests. The mother refused. So the cops cordoned off the block and administered breath tests to each kid as he or she left the party. Not a single underage guest had been drinking. The police then began writing traffic tickets for all of the cars around the house hosting the party. The mother told The Post, “It almost seemed like they were angry that they didn’t find anything.”

I think MADD started off with a noble ideal, but their ideals are ignoring reason and moving into a realm where civil liberties are getting trampled. I wish we’d all just take a collective breath and figure out a workable solution instead of sanctioning these extremely authoritarian tactics with our silent consent.

Are you a parent? What would you do?