Lowering the Drinking Age

There is a movement afoot (to use Sherlock Holmes' word) to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18 in Pennsylvania. One of the many college presidents who have signed on to this movement and is actively promoting the agenda is the president of Elizabethtown College, Ted Long. He, along with many others, is convinced that the reason why there is so much of the dangerous and sometimes fatal practice of binge drinking on college campuses is because the age limit is set too high, that lowering the minimum age for the legal consumption of alcohol will have a sufficiently satisfactory effect on diminishing the participation in binge drinking.

Derek Melleby, of the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding (CPYU wrote an excellent opinion piece in the Sunday Lancaster News that points out some fatal flaws in Long's argument.

It seems to me that part of what Long, and those with a similar argument, are doing is working to abandon - or at least greatly lessen - their responsibility for helping students that might be or are given to even one experience with the illegal consumption of alcohol. As Melleby points out in his article, the problem is rooted in a culture that increasingly encourages ignoring any reason to delaying gratification of any kind - alcohol, drugs, sex, possessions, etc. And, as Melleby points out, and despite what Long and others want to argue, having raised the legal minimum drinking age from 18 to 21 HAS had a very positive effect on reducing injuries and fatalities associated with alcohol consumption.

Long argues that, because there is so much time spent having to police students there is, then, insufficient time for counseling students. I wonder how much time Long himself has done either? If he thinks that those who do the policing cannot also do the counseling, i would refer him to a friend of mine who is a cop on a local municipal police force who does just that. Or perhaps he does not think that there are enough available staff to do the policing with sufficient staff left to do the counseling. Hmmm... maybe an increase in staff could help resolve that dilemma. In either case, it means a greater expenditure of college resources one way or the other. Perhaps that's something he's trying to avoid (although the college has gone through tremendous expansion in the 17 years i've lived in the Elizabethtown community - a tremendous expenditure, so it's not that money isn't available).

Or maybe Melleby is right. Perhaps Long is under the assumption that one of the reasons students come to Elizabethtown college is for the alcohol experience. If that's true, that doesn't say much good about the college, does it? And while that, indeed, may be why SOME students enroll there, i seriously doubt if that's the motivation for but a handful.

No, i seriously doubt lowering the drinking age will be helpful to the college or the community.

In fact, i would advocate not only keeping the drinking age at 21, i'm inclined to be in favor of raising the driving age from 16 to 18 in Pennsylvania.

When "a long time" isn't long enough

Here's an excerpt from an article entitled Pope Pelosi at the Gate that ran in newspapers over the past few days (i read it in our local Sunday paper, i found it online in Thursday's San Francisco Chronicle):

Citing Barack Obama's recent pass on a similar question - "At what point does a baby get human rights?" - Brokaw asked Pelosi what she would say to Obama were he to ask her advice.

Pelosi didn't finesse her answer, as Obama did when he said the question was above his pay grade, but she may wish she had.

"I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time," Pelosi began. "And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctrines of the church have not been able to make that definition. ... St. Augustine said at three months. We don't know. The point is, is that it shouldn't have an impact on a woman's right to choose. ... I don't think anybody can tell you when life begins, human life begins."

I'm glad the article included the response of the Catholic Church - the right response, i might add - but i want to add an excerpt from the Epistle of Barnabas, a Church document dating to around 100 B.C, more than two hundred years prior to Augustine...

Do not kill an unborn child through abortion, nor destroy it after birth.

Regardless of the attempts (or lack thereof) to define when "human" life begins, regardless of Pelosi's consistency of being an ardent, practicing Catholic, regardless of her having studied for a long time the issue, it is quite clear she has not studied it enough - or perhaps she has studied only long enough suit her own bias.