Family Values

When we were little, our parents got into a routine of having a glass of sherry in the evening. They'd be sitting in the family room, and my mother would typically say to one of us, "Go break a law, kid." Which meant, go pour us a glass of wine. It offended her that the government would decide that her kids could not touch a container containing alcohol, whether to carry it to her, to pour some for her, to hand her a glass, or whatever, in the privacy of our own home.

It was also traditional in our family to let the kids have a glass of diluted wine with holiday dinners, and a sip from an adult's beer at a party was considered a kind of treat. I get the feeling we weren't the only family like this.

This past weekend my 17-year-old son and I attended my niece's (his cousin's) wedding in Arizona. We went to the rehearsal dinner, which was held at a nice resort in the foothills of Tucson. The groom's family is from Connecticut, and they wanted the whole thing to be "Western" style, so it was like a dude-ranch thing; everybody was issued a straw hat and a bandana -- yellow for the bride's outnumbered family and blue for the groom's -- and at one point some actors dressed up like cowboys came and staged a hold-up, etcetera. Our side of the family all being from Arizona, we wouldn't have done it that way, but, whatever.

So the waiter came around with the wine, and I asked him to pour a glass for The Kid. He looked confused, then complied, and then came back and tried to card the boy. I finally said, "No, he's not twenty-one, if you don't want to serve him, don't." He was very apologetic and said he had "gotten caught." He was in trouble now for serving wine to a young adult, six feet tall, sitting with his father at a family-oriented private affair.

After a while one of the guys from the groom's side who were sitting with us -- our two new friends both had MBAs from Duke, where they were buddies with the very-Republican groom -- called the waiter over and said he hadn't tried the white wine, and could he please have a glass? He then passed that to me, and we poured it into my son's water glass, and everybody was happy.

Let me note, for the record, that the probability of this fancy-schmancy place losing their liquor license for serving a minor very closely approximates zero-point-zero. If the ABC were to start carding people at private dinners at resorts, they would be seen as undermining an industry that is probably the biggest money-maker for an area like Tucson, the tourism industry. It's one thing to check customers in a college bar, the fact is they just aren't going to make everybody in the bride's and the groom's families show ID while they're sitting at a banquet listening to sentimental speeches about the lovely couple.

By comparison, I was once sitting in a college pub in Essex, England, and I asked a friend, a professor, what the drinking age there was. "Drinking age?" he asked me, quizzically (think of that with an English accent).

"Yes," I said, "How old do you have to be to have a beer here?"

He looked at me like I was crazy. "Why would there be a 'drinking age?'" he asked me. I felt very American at that moment, worrying about whether the government would allow someone to do something that the English consider extremely ordinary. I think it has something to do with the concept of individual freedom.

Now the question here is not whether a seventeen-year-old is old enough to drink a glass of wine. Some may think so, some may not, people have been sharing wine with their young ones since the dawn of time, there have been teetotalers for a long time, too. I'm not asking whether you agree with my decision, I'm asking whether I should have the right to make it.

The question has to do with family values. In my family, we do share a sip of wine with the kids on special occasions. And the question is, should it be the government's place to tell us we can't do that?

So: family values, but not evangelical family values.

You know what I think. I don't think I needed the threat of government crackdown to decide whether it was appropriate for my son, sitting with me at a family function, to have a glass of wine or not. I consider that to be a decision for me to make, part of my responsibility as a father, and in this case I would decide to value family tradition over the restrictions of some law.

These days we have the Family Blah Blah groups arguing that America's "family values" are being usurped by the liberal establishment, etcetera etcetera. Now here's the real question. Do they really believe that people should practice their family values, or do they believe that people should live according to their values? (Noting preemptively that there is nothing at all in the Bible telling people to abstain from alcohol, in fact quite the opposite.)

I'm all for parents passing their values down to their children. I think the result is diversity, individualism, pride. I am against the government imposing values on families: I think the result can only be a kind of milquetoast homogeneity, weakness, and shame.

Curious to know if anybody else sees it my way, are we really talking about "family values," or is all of this a battle to make sure that one group's or another's specific values are forced by the government on everybody?