The latest from the Center for Consumer Freedom. BTW, if you’re not getting their daily email update, you ought to be — go here to sign up. The stuff they find will in turn shock, amuse and scare the shit out of you:

Return of the Jackbooted Teetotalers

Earlier this month we told you about police in Northern Virginia bursting into bars and arresting patrons for the crime of being tipsy. Under fire from citizens and legislators, authorities are now trying to defend their tactics — and their story reconfirms our worst fears.

It will probably surprise you to learn that “you can’t be drunk in a bar.” So says Fairfax County (VA) Police Chief J. Thomas Manger. According to police, public intoxication is an offense worthy of arrest, and a tavern is a public place.

Here’s The Washington Post with one woman’s story: “As the designated driver in her dinner party, Pat Habib was careful to consume no more than one alcoholic drink and follow it up with two sodas. So she was shocked when a police officer singled her out of the crowd at Jimmy’s Old Town Tavern in Herndon and asked her to step outside to prove her sobriety.”

That’s right. The police forced her to prove she was sober — in a bar. Among the tactics they used to tell who might be drunk: “frequent trips to the bathroom.” You’d think the police would have something better to do than play hall monitor.

The Fairfax County Council agrees that “the police overstepped their bounds and overreacted.” But the county constables insist that their policy of harassing social drinkers is “proactive,” and claim to be targeting “the root causes of alcohol-related deaths.”

In other words, they’re subjecting people to arrest for what they might do. Memo to the powers that be: the Department of Precrime in the Tom Cruise film Minority Report was supposed to be fictional.

Ace Ventura, ‘Companion Animal’ Detective?

If you live in San Francisco and have a dog or a cat, you may be surprised to learn that you are no longer that animal’s “owner.” This week the city finalized a new provision of law that no longer considers pets as personal property. Instead, humans are legally considered “animal guardians.”

Similar changes of law, proposed and lobbied by animal rights organizations including “In Defense Of Animals,” have recently occurred in Boulder, Colorado; in both Berkeley and West Hollywood, California; and in the entire state of Rhode Island. They typically seek to ban the terms “pet” and “owner,” replacing them with “companion animal” and “guardian.” Los Angeles lawmakers recently turned down a like-minded proposal.

This effort parallels the so-called “Sentient Beings” campaign, run by the national animal-rights group Farm Sanctuary and its misguided celebrity spokesperson Mary Tyler Moore. The campaign is going from town to town in at least 12 states, asking city councils to adopt resolutions declaring livestock exempt from “inhumane” treatment (including, of course, the act of being eaten). So far, cities in California, Florida, New Jersey, and Ohio have signed on.

Duane Flemming, president of the American Veterinary Medical Law Association, told the Los Angeles Times last year that these trends are setting a “dangerous precedent… This is a slippery slope. It is a very dangerous situation. The real, true, underlying sub-goal is to ultimately change people’s perceptions, all the time heading toward the concept of getting legal standing. Once you can do that, the animal-rights people can change the fabric of our nation.”

See what I mean?

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 16th, 2003 at 6:12 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Alcohol, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.