The Amethyst Initiative is designed to bring the debate over lowering the legal drinking age from 21 to 18 to the forefront in 2009. As hard as it may be to believe, educators from colleges across the country actually support dropping the drinking age.

They claim that doing so would curb the desire for binge drinking among their students. Opponents say that raising the drinking age created a drop in the number of drunken driving fatalities.

One of the typical arguments about why the drinking age should be lowered really ticks me off. It goes something like this:

“If an 18-year-old can join the military and die for his country, he ought to be able to drink.”

That is one of the stupidest lines of reasoning I’ve ever heard.

For one thing, the military teaches discipline and responsibility. Chugging a beer does not.

But let’s apply that same logic with a similar argument: one might argue that driving a car carries great responsibility. It certainly should be left to responsible people. In North and South Dakota, a driver with a beginner’s permit can legally drive alone as early as 14 1/2 years of age.

So if, by those states’ laws, someone 14 1/2 is legally-responsible enough to drive a car, why doesn’t that mean that he should be legally-responsible enough to be shipped overseas into a warzone and potentially die for his country?

If we’re going to compare totally unrelated things and pretend that they’re identical, then let’s go all out! The youngest age that any state suggests a child can do anything “grown up” ought to be the universal age at which he should be able to do all things “grown up,” right?

So forget about sending them to high school…just pluck them up right out of middle school and ship them off to a Quonset hut somewhere before they know what hit ‘em. And don’t forget to pack plenty of beer so they can take their minds off the irrational logic over why being able to do one thing ought to automatically mean being able to do something else that’s totally different.

Any parents out there jumping for joy at that thought? Didn’t think so. Because there’s a reason that different things are appropriate at different ages.

If I ever have kids and they want to attend a college that supports lowering the drinking age just because it doesn’t want to deal with educating its students about alcohol dangers or with enforcing alcohol rules on campus, I’d have a real hard time paying tuition there. They sure don’t sound capable of sending a good message to kids as far as I’m concerned.