My teen hijinks were silly fun, not alcohol-fueled drunken groping

By David McElroy · October 1, 2018

I try to imagine a Senate committee looking into my past and trying to find problematic episodes in my teen years that would disqualify me from holding a position of public trust. What would they find?

Well, they might find out about the time that my best friend and I had to sneak a coffin — an actual used casket — out of our church basement to sneak it back into a funeral home. We had borrowed the coffin for a Halloween horror house, but I lied about already having returned it. One thing led to another until Larry and I managed to sneak the coffin out of the church basement and into the funeral home without anybody seeing us. It was like something from a bad movie.

Or they might hear about the time I was trying to find a way into our high school on a weekend and the assistant principal caught me and threatened to call the police. But I talked him into calling the principal at home so that he could give me permission to go into the school — on the pretext of getting something from the newspaper office — so we escaped unharmed. Instead of getting to call the cops on us, the fuming assistant principal had to escort us inside and let us get what we wanted.

Or it’s even possible they’d hear about me trying to stuff myself into this mailbox on a church trip to North Carolina. In fact, they might hear a lot of silly or ridiculous stories. But they wouldn’t hear a single allegation of actual misconduct such as the ones that have started dribbling out about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Why? Were we better people than he and his friends were? Not at all. I simply ran in a culture of kids who didn’t use alcohol or other recreational drugs. We were sober and immature. They were drunk and immature.

I don’t have any opinion about Kavanaugh or whether he ought to be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court. If you understand my political philosophy, you might understand why. (I don’t want anybody in such positions, but that’s another subject for another time.)

As Republicans and Democrats argue about Kavanaugh’s past, his history of teen alcohol use — and what he might have done while drunk — have become a focal point. It’s framed in terms of sexual assault, but the truth is that it’s impossible to ever really know the truth about what happened. Not only are these clouded memories from decades later, but the bigger issue is that these stories involve teen kids who were routinely getting drunk and doing things they almost certainly don’t remember.

Do you think we would be hearing these accusations if there had been no alcohol involved? It’s theoretically possible, of course, but it seems to me that the big villain here is an American culture which treats drinking alcohol and intentionally getting drunk as a reasonable and normal part of life.

I knew people who lived like that when I was in high school and college, but I intentionally made a very different choice. I looked around and saw what alcohol did to many of the people who used it and decided that it wasn’t a smart choice. For me, it wasn’t a religious or moral issue. It was an issue of risks and culture.

The people in that Senate committee wouldn’t have dared to make alcohol use the issue last week, though, because pretty much everybody in politics — Republican or Democrat — lives in the same alcohol-fueled culture. When I worked in politics, I saw it constantly. Campaigns and party organizations were awash in booze. You were nobody if you didn’t get wasted with the rest and do things you would regret in coming days. (I knew one woman — later elected to statewide office here — who would get drunk and start taking her clothes off. Her boyfriend would constantly tell her to “cover your beaver, dear.”)

Alcohol is an accepted part of culture, simply because it always has been. The medical evidence is compelling that no amount of alcohol is safe for you to consume, but the bigger issue to me is that this drug compels people to destroy their lives and take others with them.

I know men who’ve been drunk and had sex with drunken women, wondering later whether what they did might have been rape. I know women who have been blackout drunk and become conscious to find they had been raped while they were conscious or semi-conscious. This is a routine part of the culture, whether most people want to admit it or not.

Few people will behave this way when sober. But when they’re drunk, their inhibitions are down — and people do whatever feels good in the moment.

I don’t want to use law the ban alcohol. I don’t want to use the force of law to ban any sort of recreational drug, but I wish serious and responsible people could have honest conversations about the tradeoffs involved in the use of this dangerous drug — and I wish they could see what they’re teaching their children about what it means to live a normal life.

I have no doubt that I would have done some stupid things along the way — dangerous things — if I had used alcohol. But one of the best decisions I ever made was to stay away from the stuff.

This culture would be hard to change. The evidence against alcohol is compelling, but it’s so hardwired for people to believe that alcohol equals fun. I heard a conversation a couple of weeks ago among some local teens that illustrates that.

An attractive teen girl said something about getting some alcohol and one of the boys in the group said he didn’t drink.

“And that’s why you’re no fun,” the girl said to the boy, leaving him looking embarrassed. “Anybody who wants to get with me has got to party it up.”

They left soon thereafter and I’ll never see them again, but the odds are strong that this boy is going to tell himself — at some point — that he has to start drinking alcohol if he wants to be part of that girl’s crowd. And another kid will be pulled into a life that will leave him doing things that he will almost certainly regret.

It’s your decision about whether you want to be a part of that culture or not. I don’t want to make the decision for you. But don’t pretend that there’s no choice. Just because it’s always been the path of least resistance for those around you doesn’t mean you have to choose that path for yourself.

I hope you’ll consider that maybe it’s a smarter choice to stay away from it and to teach your children why it’s a bad idea.

Some people won’t consider you “fun” anymore. And your silly stories might be less memorable. But you might live a saner and healthier life.

Alcohol is the real villain in the Kavanaugh story. Unfortunately, nobody was there to stop those kids from drinking themselves to oblivion — leaving all of them wondering years later what really happened.

Note: I’ve written before about the medical evidence against alcohol and there’s been more evidence to come out since I wrote that.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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