By Chris Powell
Judging by legislation they are advocating, Democrats in the General Assembly think, for the moment anyway, that minors are not capable of fully understanding and making decisions that may be life-altering. The Democrats would raise from 16 to 18 the age at which Connecticut allows marriage. They also would increase the parole eligibility of offenders who committed their crimes before age 25.
Of course most marriages of minors are likely to involve unplanned pregnancies and a desire to provide the babies with their natural parents. But such “shotgun” marriages are not especially likely to endure. Besides, nothing prevents an underage couple from supporting each other before marriage, and adoption and abortion are always available. Marrying off a girl to someone who may have mainly just exploited her can wreck her chances in life.
The premise for increasing parole eligibility for younger offenders is more questionable. While the legislation’s advocates say young offenders often don’t know what they’re doing, evidence that breaks through the secrecy of Connecticut’s juvenile courts suggests that many young offenders know exactly what they are doing and laugh at the law, knowing also that there is little will to punish them.
But if the marriage and parole bills are enacted and thereby confirm that young people are not fit to make important decisions, Connecticut may face some cognitive dissonance. For under other state laws the same minors who will not be competent to get married before 18 and not fit to be held fully responsible for serious crime will remain free to have abortions and even get sex-change therapy in school without parental consent or awareness.
There is no logic to this inconsistency. It’s just that abortion, leniency with crime, and sex-change therapy for minors are considered virtuous in the sort of liberalism that animates Connecticut’s Democratic Party, which controls the legislature. The objective of the marriage and parole legislation is not really to protect young people but to be politically correct.
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ACCOUNTABILITY DIES: As much as accountability is work and a pain, it is a fundamental obligation of democratic government. But on both the state and municipal levels, government in Connecticut often disagrees.
A few weeks ago the state’s chief public defender, TaShun Bowden-Lewis, who is Black, leveled an accusation of racism against the commission responsible for her and the rest of the Division of Public Defender Services. Bowden-Lewis complained that the commission was “hyper-scrutinizing” her work and should not have differed with her about an appointment. She said the commission’s disagreement with her was “discrimination.”
Responding to the politically opportunistic charge, four of the five commissioners, two of them Superior Court judges, simply resigned rather than explain themselves.
No one responsible will answer questions about what’s going on. Governor Lamont, state legislative leaders, and Judicial Department leaders were stuck with finding new commissioners willing to be called racist for disagreeing with a Black official who is supposed to report to them.
Usually when a government executive can’t get along with his supervisors, the executive has to go. Here, instead, the entire mechanism of accountability blew up.
Meanwhile state government’s “quasi-public” agencies — agencies that were created by state government but prefer to operate as private businesses — are opposing the request of the State Contracting Standards Board to be given jurisdiction over them.
At the moment the board has jurisdiction over just one “quasi-public,” the Connecticut Port Authority, whose incompetence and corruption have run up the cost of the New London State Pier project and delayed its completion. The 16 other “quasi-publics” don’t want anyone looking over their shoulder. They claim that they need to be more “nimble” than ordinary state agencies.
Yes, oversight can slow things down. That’s the rationale for totalitarianism.
Government in Connecticut has little oversight and auditing generally but is no more effective for being so “nimble.” So the jurisdiction of the Contracting Standards Board probably should be expanded, or else every state agency should be given its own oversight board. The office of Connecticut’s two state auditors can’t even begin to keep up with it all.
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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
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Chris Powell column 