How Rights Erode

In a  demonstration of how individual rights erode one bit at at time, always for a supposedly good reason, a high school in Scio, (central) Oregon is now requiring mandatory testing athletes for drugs and alcohol. Here is the incredibly disingenuous claim of the school district's superintendent, Gary Tempel -- it gives the kids a way to say they're against drugs!

“We don’t look at this as a way to catch people,” Tempel said. “This is an opportunity for our students to stand in the gap, to say this is not what they’re about.”

“This is a tool for them to use, for them to be able to say no.”

-- Corvallis Gazette-Times

Unfortunately, only athletes are given the opportunity to make this statement, because, in the most admirably strained of non sequiturs, the chess club is "not hazardous."

I wonder if Tempel considers a speeding ticket a way for his to show he's opposed to dangerous driving. Somehow, I doubt it.