Editorial: Alcohol-free tailgating illogical

Everything you love is bad for you. Cars are just huge hunks of metal that get in crashes and kill people in accidents, have malfunctions and guzzle gas like there’s no tomorrow. Cell phones turn everyone’s minds to mush, robbing people of face-to-face interaction. Soda rots your teeth and dehydrates your body. Burgers clog your arteries with every bite. And alcohol, the evilest of demons, causes puking, blackouts and unusual behavior, to say the least.

With all these negative side effects, all these things must be bad. Right?

It’s easy to be dramatic and exaggerate the negative effects to highlight danger, but at some point, it just gets ridiculous. Alcohol isn’t inherently evil, and some kinds of alcohol — like red wine — are good for your health. However, alcohol-free tailgating would have you believe otherwise.

Alcohol-free tailgating stems from a very admirable intention. The idea of wanting to dissuade underage college kids from drinking, and to discourage the excessive beer-chugging that sometimes goes on before games, is a good one. No one wants to ruin pre-game spirit by having to call an ambulance for a passed-out friend. The intention is good, and theoretically, the idea is a win-win. Unfortunately, a good idea isn’t always enough, and we all know what they say about the road to hell — it’s paved with good intentions.

The harmful part comes out when people start condemning drinking altogether, instead of condemning drinking in excess. There’s nothing wrong with drinking in moderation, just like there’s nothing wrong with indulging in a bar of chocolate from time to time.

Condemning alcohol means telling a whole group of people they’re being reckless, that they’re doing something wrong. It means the subtle implication that drinking is correlated to some lack of moral compass, no matter how safe that drinking is.

It’s not just a matter of a ‘teaching moment’ gone wrong, either; the university is expending valuable time and resources on this misguided venture. If there’s a group of people that really feels so passionately about the tailgate, then they should be the ones in charge. The university already has a system for start-up organizations; if students want something, they’ll find a way to make it happen.

We don’t mean to make light of excessive drinking, alcohol abuse or addiction. All three are serious problems that are fully deserving of attention, and that people need to be aware of, but this isn’t a zero-sum game. It isn’t that you can either care about those problems or drink. You can make your own decisions, and respect those of others as well.

For comparison, consider abstinence-only sex education. Believing in abstinence is a personal choice that every person has the right to make, but realistically, not everyone in the world is going to swear off sex to make sure they don’t get pregnant. The people who still want to have that experience deserve education, not condemnation.

In the same way, trying to vilify alcohol won’t dissuade everyone; instead, it prevents people from realizing there’s a safe way for them to drink, and normalizes the idea that all drinking should result in getting plastered.

Turning drinking into two sides of a battlefield isn’t helping anyone. No one should have to make a choice between getting wasted or adopting some Puritanical attitude that alcohol is the source of all evil. Finding a middle ground might sound cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less of a right answer. We should be promoting the idea of college students being independent, thoughtful individuals who can look at an issue and make their own decisions, including seeing a bottle of beer at a tailgate and making their own choice of whether or not to pick it up.