This guy is a moron

I just read an article about a father who bought his seven-year-old son alcoholic lemonade and didn't realize the problem until a security guard at the baseball game spotted the child with the beverage and intervened. The father, a classical archeology professor, said he had never consumed or even heard of Mike's Hard Lemonade. I can believe that he's never drank the stuff, but I have a hard time buying that he's never heard of the stuff. They advertise the hell out of it on television, and I don't believe that he doesn't watch any t.v. whatsoever. Even if I buy that he hasn't heard of it, I would've been wary of giving my child something that has the word "hard" in it without checking the label first. Mike's, like a lot of malt beverages, are in glass bottles; a format that I've not seen with old-fashioned lemonade. These bottles are similar in feel to those of beer bottles, but are clear instead of colored. It's sold in grocery stores in the liquor section and, at least at the stores I frequent, it's often on sale as an end-cap so that they will sell more of it to the college-aged crowd that lives nearby (meaning that he should've seen crap like this at least ONCE in a store).

What gets me angry with this father is that he feels that Child Protective Services owes him an apology for taking his son away from him and, later, forcing him [the father] to move into a hotel so that he was away from his son while doing their investigation. He says that he made a "silly mistake," but that the people who were doing their jobs made "an even bigger error, and [he] would like to be able to say to [his son] that institutions, like people, can learn from their mistakes." They didn't give a child alcohol and let him consume most of the bottle. And while the hospital didn't find any alcohol in the child's system, it is possible that he probably sipped it and, to not upset his father, was pouring it out on the ground when he wasn't looking because the child didn't like it. However, the child even said he felt nauseas after consuming 12 ounces of the stuff [roughly more than half the bottle], so I don't know if he drank it or not & since we don't know how long he had it, I can't determine why his blood alcohol level was at zero. Giving a seven-year-old liquor is not a minor thing; alcohol in a young child can be damaging to his developing system, and to imply that letting him consume the whole bottle without bothering to check it beforehand is not a big deal is very disturbing to me. People make mistakes; this is something that I accept as part of life. It's just that he wants to act as if the steps they took to investigate the situation were far more egregious than his careless act, and that is what is pissing me off. I'd rather put up with a week's worth of inconvenience to let CPS do their jobs than demand that they apologize for trying to make sure that this was an isolated incident and not the act of a malicious (or, at the very least, neglectful) parent.

He ought to be glad he's not being charged with anything.

Moron.