Jesus turned water into wine. Modern-day abolitionists want to turn that wine into poison, and modern-day drinkers want to chase them out of town. We’re come a long way baby.

Not.

Let’s start with some facts:

As a long-time drinker, I can say with some authority that alcohol is a toxin. Half a quart of hard liquor in half an hour will probably leave you unconscious. More than that can kill you.

However, people rarely drink that much, that fast. Those who do are probably engaging in many other reckless behaviors, too, that will kill them long before the alcohol does.

The big question is, what about the millions of people who do not drink themselves into oblivion, but just into a mild buzz? And what about people who don’t drink for the buzz at all, but despite it – they’re drinking because they simply like the taste of a beverage, especially with dinner, that happens to contain a small amount of a nuisance toxin?

Most wine drinkers fall into this category, myself included.

As you might expect, the matter has been studied. Most recent studies suggest a strong link between heavy drinking and many different diseases – no surprise – but also a tenuous link between even moderate drinking and some cancers and vascular disease.

(Please don’t rebut these studies with a story about your long-living great aunt who drank every day.)

This link between alcohol and illness is, however, difficult to get a real fix on, because it is confounded by many variables. For example, people who drink moderately tend to be moderate in many of their other habits as well. And moderation is usually a healthy thing.

As for people who don’t drink at all, they tend to be moderate in all things including moderation. That’s why their alcohol consumption is not moderate, but is highly immoderate – it’s zero. These immoderate individuals very often engage in immoderate activities like ultra-marathons and are immoderately ultra-fit.

Comparing the health of a teetotaling ultra-marathoner with a moderate-drinking three-times-a-week treadmill exerciser will produce skewed and misleading results tending to show better health in the former that appears to be, but is not, a result of his teetotalling. Correlation very often does not equal causation.

Here’s another example of a confounding factor. Heavy drinkers tend to die young. People who die young are never included in studies of populations that are not young. Therefore, studies of not-young people will tend to show that drinkers are healthier than they really are, since the unhealthiest drinkers are dead and unincluded in the study.

The Surgeon General last week re-ignited this controversy-for-the-millennia by suggested that warning labels be put on alcohol, much as we’ve done on cigarettes for many years and as we already do on alcohol as it pertains to pregnant women.

As a sign of our times, the reaction was along party lines, but not in the way you might have expected. Strait-laced conservatives were outraged that anyone would dare warn them of the health hazards of getting intoxicated (even if the warning is only a warning and not a ban) while libertine liberals applauded the suggestion.

In reading the commentary, you might think the SG’s suggestion drove conservatives to drink, while it sent liberals onto their wagons.

That partisan reaction seems odd until you realize that the SG is a Democrat. In today’s charged political climate, that means many Democrats will reflexively like whatever he says, while many Republicans will dislike it.

In the mostly-conservative Wall Street Journal, for example, a member of the Editorial Board (with a BA in American Studies – owwwhh!!!) wrote an editorial unburdened by any supporting data announcing that the Surgeon General (a graduate of Yale Medical School) was simply wrong.

Other conservative commentators with similar “qualifications” weighed in with similar sentiments. The common theme was that the SG’s suggestion was yet another example of governmental overreach. It was Democrats trying yet again to control your life by warning you about things that might hurt you.

Well, maybe. But it seems to me that a fine-print warning that alcohol can be unhealthy is not exactly in the same category of, say, a warning that coffee can burn you or water can drown you. This is particularly true in view of widely published studies some years ago suggesting that moderate alcohol consumption is actually good for you – studies that were later debunked as having been confounded by the sort of lifestyle factors mentioned above.

And even if alcohol warnings are indeed in the same category as coffee-can-burn-you warnings and water-can-drown-you warnings, what’s the harm? It seems the protesters doth protest too much. A wee bit defensive, are we?

But that’s the current political world we live in. Messages are judged not by their content or other objective standards, but by the identity of the messenger. In my lifetime, America has never been so tribal. That’s bad.

By the way, I wonder about the position of our current tribal chief, for whom I’ve voted thrice now and whose performance as de facto president is great. (I especially like the idea of annexing Greenland, where we’ve had an early warning Air Force base for many years.) He is a known and admitted teetotaler. (Thank goodness – can you imagine Donald Trump intoxicated?) Wouldn’t the world be turned upside down if he were to side with the Democrat SG?

Along the same lines, I wonder how politically conservative, teetotaling Mormons reacted to the liberal SG’s suggestion.

As for me, from time to time I consider reducing my alcohol consumption, and maybe even ending it. It’s probably not the healthiest of my habits, nor the least expensive. But I hope I’m already knowledgeable enough that a silly new warning label won’t persuade me to stop, and I hope I’m mature enough that it won’t persuade me not to.