One of my favorite liberals, Camille Paglia, sees the sham that is the 21-year-old drinking age:

The National Minimum Drinking Age Act, passed by Congress 30 years ago this July, is a gross violation of civil liberties and must be repealed. It is absurd and unjust that young Americans can vote, marry, enter contracts and serve in the military at 18 but cannot buy an alcoholic drink in a bar or restaurant. The age-21 rule sets the U.S. apart from all advanced Western nations and lumps it with small or repressive countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

Congress was stampeded into this puritanical law by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, who with all good intentions were wrongly intruding into an area of personal choice exactly as did the hymn-singing 19th century temperance crusaders, typified by Carrie Nation smashing beer barrels with her hatchet. Temperance fanaticism eventually triumphed and gave us 14 years of Prohibition. That in turn spawned the crime syndicates for booze smuggling, laying the groundwork for today’s global drug trade. Thanks a lot, Carrie!

Now that marijuana regulations have been liberalized in Colorado, it’s time to strike down this dictatorial national law. Government is not our nanny. The decrease in drunk-driving deaths in recent decades is at least partly attributable to more uniform seat-belt use and a strengthening of DWI penalties. Today, furthermore, there are many other causes of traffic accidents, such as the careless use of cell phones or prescription drugs like Ambien — implicated in the recent trial and acquittal of Kerry Kennedy for driving while impaired.

Learning how to drink responsibly is a basic lesson in growing up — as it is in wine-drinking France or in Germany, with its family-oriented beer gardens and festivals. Wine was built into my own Italian-American upbringing, where children were given sips of my grandfather’s homemade wine. This civilized practice descends from antiquity. Beer was a nourishing food in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and wine was identified with the life force in Greece and Rome: In vino veritas (In wine, truth). Wine as a sacred symbol of unity and regeneration remains in the Christian Communion service. Virginia Woolf wrote that wine with a fine meal lights a “subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.”

What this cruel 1984 law did is deprive young people of safe spaces where they could happily drink cheap beer, socialize, chat and flirt in a free but controlled public environment. Hence in the 1980s we immediately got the scourge of crude binge drinking at campus fraternity keg parties, cut off from the adult world. Women in that boorish free-for-all were suddenly fighting off date rape. Club drugs — ecstasy, methamphetamine, ketamine (a veterinary tranquilizer) — surged at raves for teenagers and on the gay male circuit scene.

Alcohol relaxes, facilitates interaction, inspires ideas and promotes humor and hilarity. Used in moderation, it is quickly flushed from the system, with excess punished by a hangover. But deadening pills, such as today’s massively overprescribed antidepressants, linger in body and brain and may have unrecognized long-term side effects. Those toxic chemicals, often manufactured by shadowy firms abroad, have been worrisomely present in a recent uptick of unexplained suicides and massacres. Half of the urban professional class in the U.S. seems doped on meds these days.

As a libertarian, I support the decriminalization of marijuana, but there are many problems with pot. From my observation, pot may be great for jazz musicians and Beat poets, but it saps energy and willpower and can produce physiological feminization in men. Also, it is difficult to measure the potency of plant-derived substances like pot. With brand-name beer or liquor, however, purchased doses have exactly the same strength and purity from one continent to another, with no fear of contamination by dangerous street additives like PCP.

Exhilaration, ecstasy and communal vision are the gifts of Dionysus, god of wine. Alcohol’s enhancement of direct face-to-face dialogue is precisely what is needed by today’s technologically agile generation, magically interconnected yet strangely isolated by social media. Clumsy hardcore sexting has sadly supplanted simple hanging out over a beer at a buzzing dive. By undermining the art of conversation, the age-21 law has also had a disastrous effect on our arts and letters, with their increasing dullness and mediocrity.

That last paragraph may be a leap into Conclusionland, but the rest certainly makes sense. Yes, alcohol can be a gateway drug to harder drugs, but so can marijuana. Yes, alcohol poses problems in society, but legal drugs do. (The most common gateway to heroin? Prescription painkillers.)

There is no question that the 21-year-old drinking age has had the unintended side-effect of encouraging binge drinking. Police are dealing with, in some ways, bigger alcohol-related programs when the 21-year-old national drinking age was supposed to eliminate all that. And any police officer in a college town — except perhaps college towns where the college is a Bible college — that they write a lot of underage-drinking tickets.

There is an opening here for the Republican Party if the GOP had more Republicans like U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and less government-is-good-when-we’re-in-charge Republicans. Glenn Harlan Reynolds wrote last year:

Republicans do badly with young voters, and one of the main reasons is that they’re seen as uncool. This is probably unfair — it’s not Republicans who are imposing college speech codes on students — but it’s the perception.

As a reader of my blog named Jeff Wimble wrote:

“Everything comes down to the movie ‘Footloose.’ For a large majority of people, thepolitical question is, ‘How would the sanctimonious preacher from the movie ‘Footloose’ feel about this subject?’ They answer the question, and then take the opposite position.

“This mind-set is absolutely ingrained in a lot of people my age (a couple of years younger than Gen-X). For every preachy moral conservative I’ve met in real life, I’ve seen 20 on TV. For each Baptist I know in real life, I’ve seen 10 in movies. To me, they are all the preacher from ‘Footloose.’ ”

OK, the media do their best to give that impression — for example, playing up the unfortunate rape comments of Missouri Republican candidate Todd Akin, and playing down the equally unfortunate rape comments of Colorado Democratic legislator Joe Salazar.

But it’s also true that the GOP doesn’t do as much as it can to counter the “Footloose” factor. So here are a couple of suggestions.

First, get rid of the federally mandated 21-year-old drinking age. Introduced by Republicans (it was spearheaded by Elizabeth Dole) in the 1980s, it was always a lousy idea. The result has been more, not less, alcohol abuse on campus, as student drinkers have moved from public venues, where there was supervision, to dorm rooms and frat houses, where there’s less.

And it’s fundamentally unfair. At 18, people can sign contracts, get married and sign up for student loans that will haunt them for decades. They can join the military and go off to die in foreign lands. But federal law presumes they’re too immature to have a beer.

Would the preacher from “Footloose” support repealing the federal drinking-age mandate? No. And that’s yet another reason for Republicans to do so.

Cellphones are another place where young people are oppressed by The Man. As of this year, unlocking your cellphone — putting in a new SIM card so that you can use it with the carrier of your choice — is a felony for which you can potentially get five years in prison and a half-million-dollar fine.

This benefits cellphone carriers, who can lock you into their networks — but not the users of cellphones, a group that includes pretty much everyone under 30. The College Republicans have already come out in favor of repealing this prohibition; their older counterparts — you know, the ones in Congress — should follow their lead.

As a bonus, this ban actually comes courtesy of a librarian. You see, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits something called “circumvention” technology — and leaves interpretation of that broad yet vague term to the Librarian of Congress, who recently ruled in favor of the carriers.

In fact, the GOP should take the lead in revising the DMCA (and other onerous intellectual-property laws). The act generally lets motion-picture and record-industry moguls exploit their consumers, who are disproportionately young. It’s been used to shut down many music-sharing sites, readers for the blind, and other technologies. …

There are a lot of opportunities along these lines, and a smart, young, libertarian-leaning Republican in the Senate — like, say, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio — could get a lot of mileage out of seizing them, both personally and in terms of brightening the GOP image.