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Barbara Ellison, who lives in Glastonbury, which in 1999 became the second Connecticut town to pass the ordinance, says she doesn't allow her son Tim, 17, to drink, and she likes knowing that other parents can't undermine her decision with impunity. "Despite what they think, parents often can't control what goes on in their home once kids start drinking," she says. "If teens drink, they usually drink to excess. And you can ask for their keys, but they have a spare or give you a key that isn't even to their car." Ellison speaks from painful experience. In 2002, a local parent supervised a tent party at which kids supposedly surrendered their keys. Nevertheless, several of them left the home at 3 a.m. and drove to the apartment where Ellison's son Doug, 20, lived apart from his parents. All the young people continued to drink, and later that morning, when Doug went to buy a soda at a local market, he crashed his car and died.
Other supporters of the ordinance point out that driving is not the only potential danger posed by teen drinking. "With alcohol come violence and sexual assault. Most of the rapes we investigate involve alcohol," says Lieutenant Kenneth Bakalar of the Stratford police. "Parents don't even know what is going on in their basements."
Marsha Rosenbaum, director of the national teen substance-abuse organization Safety First, acknowledges that underage drinking is an urgent issue, but she argues that ordinances like the one proposed in Stratford won't resolve the problem. "For the past three decades, we have been trying to get our kids to abstain until they're of age, and we've failed to do that," she says. "If we say they can't drink in our home, they'll just find somewhere else, somewhere more dangerous."
Other specifics in the house-party ordinances have people concerned, such as what exactly constitutes reasonable cause on the part of police. Concedes Turner of the CCSUD: "The core issue of the debate for people who oppose it is, What gives police the right to come onto their property? How do they know that if they're coming in for one thing, they won't try to find something else?" Turner maintains that police will merely respond to concerns brought to their attention by "responsible citizens," not snoop around in people's backyards.
Members of the Danbury town council still aren't convinced. After debating a house-party ordinance last month, they voted unanimously to send it back to the subcommittee to be rewritten to give greater recognition to parental authority. Joel Urice, a council member, calls the proposed ordinance "Orwellian" and says that while the town's intent is to stop binge drinking and unsupervised house parties, "this doesn't get at the problem. Instead, it usurps parents' rights to raise and manage children in the way they see fit in their own home." He mentions, for example, that if a teenager visits a grandparent and wants to have a glass of wine with dinner as he customarily does at home, it would be against the law. And he is equally troubled by the nonspecific nature of what would constitute "reasonable cause" in those situations. "If police go up to a house and look through a window and see a bottle of wine on the shelf and a minor in the home, that would be enough to let them enter the home," he says.