But only if they're thoroughly cooked:
An Oregon rugby player remains in jail Tuesday after being arrested on charges he left his 2-year-old daughter in a vehicle in the parking lot of a Nevada brothel on a 95-degree day.
Lucien Hoffman, of Bend, Ore., is being held in the Storey County Detention Center in lieu of $40,000 bail on charges of child neglect.
Police arrested Hoffman early Sunday night at the World Famous Mustang Ranch brothel in Sparks, Nev., after a security guard found the child crying inside the car, according to Storey County Sheriff's Det./Sgt. Kenneth Quirk.
Hoffman, a wing for Bend Rugby who goes by the nicknames Luke and "Torpedo," had been attending a pool party and barbecue at the brothel, a co-sponsor of a Labor Day weekend rugby tournament in Reno organized by the Reno Zephyrs Rugby Club.
[...]
Quirk said that had the child been noticed by the brothel security guard, Hoffman's vehicle wouldn't have been allowed in. When security guards did hear her crying and couldn't locate her parents, they contacted the sheriff's office and took the child inside the brothel."It was 95 degrees out at that time of day, and you have to figure another 30 degrees on top of that inside a vehicle even with the windows down," Quirk said.
According to the Reno Rugby Club's Web site, the brothel pool party was an after-event for its first "Biggest Little Rugby Tournament in the World," a two-day competition drawing 14 rugby teams from around the West Coast.
Hoffman attended the tournament with his girlfriend, a woman who is not the mother of the 2-year-old toddler. Hoffman shares joint custody of the child with her biological mother.
"It was probably not a good decision to take the child [to Nevada] in the first place, but basically it was sort of like a vacation for them," [rugby club president Matt] Burke said.
Hope they had a nice time.
I hung out with a lot of rugby players in college. They were, by and large, barely domesticated apes, given to drinking near-lethal amounts of alcohol while subjecting themselves and those around them to the foulest degradations imaginable. But even so, I'm pretty sure the same guys I watched swan dive out of a third-story window into a wading pool filled with Everclear and piss would have a hard time abandoning their child in a hot car while they went to party in a fer chrissakes brothel.
Burke called Hoffman a good father who made a bad decision.
"We know Luke to be a good father," he said. "He's not a neglectful person or an irresponsible parent. It's unfortunate that he made the decision that he did to put here in the car, but I'm sure the decision wasn't arrived at in a neglectful manner or that he was intentionally being neglectful."
Pull the other one. As the father of a toddler, I freely admit to occasionally contemplating leaving She Who Shall Not Be Named in the car - with the A/C on of course - when I'd need to run in to the convenience store or the dry cleaners, just so I don't have to futz with the car seat, coaxing her out of the back, escorting her into the store, wrangling her while I complete my transaction (hoping she doesn't have to go to the bathroom all the while), then hustling her back into the car, all in 90+ degree heat. Never did it though, because that would make me a bad father. I don't know what parameters Burke is using, but leaving a kid in a car, sweltering heat or not, for two hours to go get your drunk on with a bunch of hookers doesn't qualify as good fathering by even the loosest of standards.
Unless you're Bing Crosby.
Actually, I think you don’t do this because it would make you a bad father. I think you don’t do this because of the unholy wrath that would come down upon you when THE WIFE found out. Because you’re a smart man, and you know she can be scary.