A middle-aged couple in Virginia have been sentenced to over 2 years in prison for serving alcohol at their son’s 16th birthday party. That’s down from 8 years on appeal, which is small comfort given the ludicrous sentence for something that should never be a target for prosecution in the first place. (Hat tip: Overlawyered.) Incredibly, the appeal focused on the question on the issue of the arresting policeman not having a warrant to search the home where the party was held, and not that arresting these people is totally counterproductive (not to mention totally fucking stupid). As others have pointed out, isn’t it better that these kids were drinking in a safe environment where parents were supervising and making sure none would drive home drunk, rather than in some parking lot somewhere?
And who was it that thought prohibition was a good idea anyway? When will legislators finally realise that banning things that aren’t directly harmful and that people want or need to do — drink booze, smoke pot, have sex, have an abortion — doesn’t make that activity go away. All these laws serve is to make legislators feel morally superior.
Looks like the virginiaisforhaters.org site is down again. Getting the message out in a distributed way might be an effective substitute. I.e. all friendly blogs can post a standard summary of the main points of the original website. I would think it would be difficult and not worth the trouble to organize a DoS attack for a bunch of blogs.
Dear David,
Have you tried http://www.angelfire.lycos.com/ to set up your website. The don’t have high prices, you could give them a try, and it might throw off the hackers for a while. Good luck!
Gail