Youth rights on the decline

What’s wrong with this picture? I vote, I pay taxes, I’m registered for the Selective Service… What’s wrong with this picture? I vote, I pay taxes, I’m registered for the Selective Service of the United States of America, and according to the state of Pennsylvania, I’m a legal adult of the age of majority. But if I should walk into a bar and try to order an alcoholic drink, I could be arrested.

The problem with this picture, of course, is what I like to call a double standard. The U.S. government seems to consider me an adult when it’s convenient for them but would prefer to pretend that I’m a child when it comes to issues of importance to me.

Let’s get this out of the way. I’m not a drinker. I don’t plan my week around drinking, and a drinking age of 18 probably wouldn’t change my life as I know it. But sometimes it’s the principle of the thing.

That said, let’s put this in perspective. An American teenager puts his life on the line by joining the military. He’s used as cannon fodder for the Iraqi insurgents. He gets an arm blown off by an improvised explosive device. He comes back to the states and his government won’t even allow him a beer at the local pub.

It’s an argument that’s been around since the Vietnam War, when young Americans first protested other matters of inequality. Some people find the “old enough to fight, old enough to drink” argument old and tired, but let’s face it, it makes a lot of sense. The age at which you can be asked to defend this country should be the age of adulthood.

In most countries, the military and drinking ages align with the age of majority. The age of majority, which is set by individual states in this country, was generally 21 years old until the ’60s. As a threshold for adulthood, 21 was borrowed from English common law and retained long after we became independent.

During the turbulent ’60s, most states dropped their age of majority because of the high numbers of young men aged 18 to 20 who were being drafted to fight in Vietnam. Twenty-nine states also lowered their drinking ages, usually to 18 but sometimes to 19 or 20 years old. A few states even employed a unique law that I’m particularly fond of, which set the drinking age at 18 for beer and wine and 21 for hard liquor.

Pennsylvania never lowered its drinking age, which has been 21 since the repeal of prohibition.

But New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Maryland and West Virginia each lowered their drinking ages at some point during the ’60s or ’70s.

National attitudes toward alcohol (not to mention young people) began to change by the beginning of the more conservative ’80s. In 1981, Mothers Against Drunk Driving was founded, and, to this date, the group’s biggest claim to fame is its successful fight for a national drinking age.

According to U.S. law, anything not specifically addressed by the federal government is to be left to the states. But MADD found a way to get around this. They lobbied Congress to tie federal highway funds with a higher drinking age, and in 1984 the National Minimum Drinking Age Act was passed, mandating that any state that employs a drinking age under 21 years old will lose 10 percent of its highway funds.

With no state being able to afford such a huge loss, all quickly complied. Wyoming was the last to pass a 21-years-old drinking-age bill in 1988. MADD heralds the law as “one of the most effective public safety measures ever undertaken,” according to its website. But I call it rationalized age discrimination.

There’s no question that the country experienced a small rise in alcohol-related highway deaths when the drinking age was lowered in some states. But that principle would hold true for all age groups. For instance, if people younger than 30 weren’t allowed to drink and the law was suddenly changed, deaths in that demographic would increase as well.

What MADD conveniently forgets to point out is that teenage drunk-driving deaths were already beginning to decline well before the national 21 drinking age, and that Canada has experienced a similar drop in young highway deaths despite the fact that each province maintains its own drinking age, at either 18 or 19 years old.

At the beginning of second-wave feminism, Betty Friedan published the book “The Feminine Mystique,” which claims that women suffer from “the problem that has no name.” Young people in this country are beginning to get a taste of a similar unnamed problem across the board.

You rarely hear of talk to increase the age at which a person is tried as an adult, pay taxes or join the military. But the drinking age was raised in every state, and there’s a trend brewing in Pennsylvania’s border states to increase the ages for other rights as well. For instance, New Jersey recently increased its tobacco purchase age to 19 years old, and West Virginia changed its gambling age from 18 to 21 years old.

I don’t know what it is about this country that makes us reluctant to trust our young people. In 2007, the United Kingdom lowered its age of candidacy from 21 to 18 years old, and in 2008, Japan will be lowering its age of majority, and subsequently, its alcohol and tobacco purchase age, from 20 to 18 years old.

Once again, the United States is moving in the wrong direction. Why are the rights of our young people slowly being taken away?

E-mail Peter at pbm1@pitt.edu.