While wandering around the internet the other day, I stumbled onto the MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) website. Don’t ask; I wind up at some pretty random sites sometimes. Believe it or not, I have a real problem with MADD, and since that probably seems a little strange to everybody but me, I decided to explain my feelings about it.

My beef with MADD really comes down to one simple fact. Yes, they do work to prevent drunk driving, and most people agree that’s a good thing, but they don’t stop there. They also lobby state legislatures and try to sway public opinion to keep the drinking age at 21, and I disagree with that. More importanly though, I dislike the fact that they are pushing that agenda under the guise of preventing drunk driving. I won’t say that young people drinking has nothing to do with drunk driving, but I will say that they’re missing the point.

If you look on their website, they list their reasons for supporting 21 as the drinking age. They start off, “Some folks think 21 was pulled out of the air. But despite what you may think, there are some pretty good reasons that age 21 was selected,” and then they go on to explain why 21 is better than 18 as a drinking age. By they way, they never actually answer the question that they asked (“what’s so special about that age”). Why is 21 better than 22 or 23? Hell, why not 20? At least that would be a round number. It’s as if they just assumed that the only possible ages were 18 and 21, which is kind of funny since they started off by talking about how arbitrary the age 21 seems. But that’s all beside the point.

Their main argument against lowering the drinking age deals with safety concerns: “Like it or not, it is clear that more young people were killed on the highways when the drinking age was 18.” I won’t disagree with their statistics; I don’t have the numbers to do it and they’re probably right anyway. But it doesn’t matter; they’re answering the wrong question and pretending they answered the right one. It’s not a question of what’s safer. It’s a question of rights and responsibilities. I’m pretty sure we’d all be safer if the drinking age were raised to 35, but nobody’s really considering that, because it wouldn’t be right. The real issue isn’t if we’d be less safe with 18 or 16 year-olds drinking, it’s whether or not they have the right to drink.

Wouldn’t it make sense to set the drinking age to 18? After all, if you’re old enough to enlist in the army, shouldn’t you be old enough to drink? Or what about the age of consent? Isn’t that a well-established age when you get to make decisions for yourself and deal with the grown-up responsibilites that come with them?

But that isn’t really the point of this post. Going back to MADD, I take offense at their implication that I can’t be in favor of lowering the drinking age without also supporting drunk driving. One is an issue of safety and the other is an issue of rights. Because they can’t stick to their main issue, if I wanted to get involved, I now would have to find a group against drunk driving but in favor of lowering the drinking age. But then, if that group decides to also campaign against cell phone use in cars, I’ll have to find yet another group who’s against drunk driving, in favor of lowering the drinking age, and ok with people talking on the phone while driving. If a group wants to fight a particular issue, they should stick to just that issue.