Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 10, 1991 TAG: 9104100409
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CAL THOMAS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But one would be wrong.
Take a case involving two Seattle restaurant workers who were fired after they tried to persuade a pregnant customer not to order an alcoholic beverage for fear it might harm her unborn baby.
Twenty-one-year-old Danita Fitch and 22-year-old G.R. Heryford were dismissed after the pregnant customer became angry and complained that the employees were reluctant to serve her an alcoholic drink.
They did not deny her service, and this is crucial. They only sought to make sure she was fully informed about the medically known effects of alcohol on unborn babies.
Heryford was the first to raise the issue after the woman ordered a rum daiquiri. He then called for Fitch, who brought along a beer-bottle label cautioning against drinking while pregnant.
A sign, which the employees said was placed in an area not likely to be seen by most customers, also warned against alcohol consumption by pregnant women.
Columnist Anna Quindlen of The New York Times is upset about this. She acknowledges that the now-former employees of the restaurant were correct in the medical sense. Pregnant women should not drink alcohol because of possible damage to their "children" (a slip of the computer keyboard; no doubt, Quindlen meant "fetus").
But then Quindlen wrote - and many in the ideological circles in which she travels join with her in thinking this way - that people ought to be able to do what they want to do, including smoking and tanning their skin, "even when those decisions are wrong."
Quindlen's inability to see the difference between tanning your own skin or destroying your own lungs and sending alcohol into the bloodstream of one's unborn child suggests the need for a course in moral reasoning.
She calls the ability to make such decisions "freedom." I call it selfishness when a "child" is involved.
What if the child developed fetal alcohol syndrome? Unlikely, says my doctor, because the woman was nine months pregnant and claimed she had not consumed alcohol during the rest of her pregnancy. But what if she had?
Courts have determined that restaurants and bars can be held responsible if customers whose alcohol consumption exceeds legal limits are involved in automobile accidents that injure or take the life of others.
Why is a written warning on a posted sign or beer bottle considered proper, but a verbal warning from an employee is not?
What if the woman had come in a month from now with her newborn child and ordered two drinks, one for her and one to put in the baby's bottle, because the child had been crying and the mother thought this was a good way to get it to sleep? Would the waiter have been justified in refusing service to the baby because it is underage?
Of course. Then what's the difference between wanting to protect a child that is newly born and one that is about to be born?
The right to do anything one wishes has achieved a kind of cult status.
Yet what parent instructs a child in the ways of selfishness? Children usually come by that naturally and must be instructed in the ways of selflessness. What parent tells a child to always put himself or herself first - don't share your cookies or toys with anyone and "look out for number one"?
Under the modern cultural mandate, when we become adults we are supposed to forget what our parents taught us and embark on a life of self-centeredness and self-satisfaction.
In matters of speech and expression - virtually the same under modern law - the right to burn the American flag is protected by the Supreme Court. But the right of two restaurant employees to voice their concerns that a customer might be endangering her soon-to-be-born "child" is deemed a dismissable offense.
The now-unemployed restaurant workers ought to hire a good lawyer and turn their firing into a free-speech case.
With all of the forms of speech and expression that are now protected, surely some protection might be afforded two people who were simply verbalizing a warning the restaurant had posted and beerlabels carry. Los Angeles Times Syndicate
by CNB