Imagine your roommate, an 18-year-old student in the Reserve Officers Training Corps, was legally allowed to drink alcohol, while you, a 20-year-old responsible public relations student, could not.

Though current laws prohibit this, if a New Hampshire lawmaker has his way, you might easily find yourself sitting in your dorm room one night while your roommate, who has a military I.D., decides to leave for a drink at T’s Pub.

N.H. State Rep. James Splaine is proposing that everyone 18 and over who has a military I.D. be allowed to purchase and consume alcoholic beverages because “it is unconscionable for us to be sending [military recruits] into battle and still be saying there are some rights [they] don’t have and one of them is the right to drink,” The Boston Globe quotes him as saying.

Though Splaine acknowledges that it is unlikely this bill will pass, he says discussion on the drinking age needs another boost. But unless he is willing to lower the drinking age universally, not just for those who possess a military I.D., Splaine is wasting his time in the Legislature.

Critics of Splaine’s proposal say lowering the drinking age for military recruits would inhibit their brain development, but the bigger problem with this bill is that it discriminates against everyone who doesn’t serve in the military. To make a law that applies to some and not others could set a dangerous precedent, and is unconstitutional anyway.

Soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan may be more stressed out than other young people, but allowing them to drink is not going to make them any better off.

Splaine was right to say that we need to “educate people [on] how to handle alcohol … because age doesn’t seem to be the main element,” but it makes no sense to target only the military.

If the idea behind this is to recruit more young people to serve their country, Splaine is proposing an illegitimate method for doing so. Being allowed to drink should never be a reason for joining the military. To think otherwise is simply ridiculous.

The New Hampshire Democrat’s proposal discriminates against underage people not serving in the military, and serves as an illegitimate way to recruiting more troops. It is an inebriated idea worth tossing to the shredders.