It’s amazing the hoops states will jump through if you threaten
to withhold federal funds. In 1984, Elizabeth Dole, then Secretary
of Transportation, promised to do just that. While she had no
direct control over the legislation of the 50 states, she said she
would yank highway dollars unless the local legislatures raised the
drinking age to 21. Most states quickly fell into line.
Wisconsin was one of the last to knuckle under, and passed the
statute only grudgingly, with loopholes. In the Cheesehead state,
it is still perfectly legal for those under the age of 21 to drink.
As long as you are with your parents or your over-21 spouse, you
can order a beer, a glass of wine, or any other alcoholic
concoction, and consume it on the premises.
Unless state representative John Ainsworth gets his way, that
is. Under the current version of the Republican lawmaker’s proposed
legislation, Bill 72, the law would be changed to allow only those
who have reached that magical age of 18 to have a drink with their
parents outside the home. An earlier version of the bill was even
more restrictive — it would have criminalized parent-supervised
under aged drinking at home, raising questions of how deeply the
government should entangle itself in private life.
In both presentations of the bill, indignant parents expressed
outrage that the legislature wants to intrude on how they raise
their children. Nor has Ainsworth done much to discourage the
interpretation of his bill as an assault on parental rights. He
told the Voice of America “in today’s society, we have all kinds of
parents. Some that probably are not observant as they should be. We
have stepparents, legal guardians, foster parents who abuse the
privilege. There should be no question in the law that it is not
appropriate to publicly serve alcohol to children that young.”
To judge by the editorial pages of the state, parental
privileges are beside the point. The Wausau Daily Herald,
for instance, wrote that “parents who take children out drinking
aren’t responsible and do need common sense transfusions.” So,
never mind them. There is no reason that children should learn to
drink responsibly now; they can wait until college to learn how to
binge drink.
While vilifying the “grape and grain” industry, the local
guardians of taste and good sense have been quick to dismiss
concerns that this legislation would simply drive underage drinking
underground. The Stevens Point Journal discounted the
argument thus: “Translation: Drinking in bars is good for kids
because it teaches them how.”
Bill 72, Ainsworth often explains, was inspired by a pregnancy.
An unidentified underage imbiber was in a bar with a male claiming
to be her father, got drunk, and became pregnant. While this is
unfortunate, hard cases often make bad law, and it’s unclear that
“closing the loophole” would prevent such things from happening
again. That is, should the liberty of a large swath of the entire
state of Wisconsin be restricted because some occasionally abuse
the privilege? Further, is the socialization argument really so
dumb? Many believe that America’s bizarre underage alcohol laws
remove a lot of the social controls that exist under more tolerant
regimes, and it isn’t a stretch to see that, at the very least,
they have a point.
Ainsworth hopes to bring the bill to a vote by the end of the
year, but why wait? The legislature could shoot this turkey down
before Thanksgiving and give Cheeseheads everywhere something to be
grateful for.
