By CHRIS POWELL
On any Monday Democratic state legislators in Connecticut will tell you that people who committed serious crimes before they turned 26 and were sentenced to prison should qualify for early parole because human brains are not fully developed before that age and lack good judgment. So Democratic legislators have been advocating a law to that effect. It came close to passing in the General Assembly session that ended last week.
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But on any Tuesday Democratic state legislators will tell you that minors — people 17 or younger — are perfectly capable of deciding, without the approval or even knowledge of their parents, whether they should have abortions or undergo sex-change therapy. Democratic legislators also will tell you that 17-year-olds should be entitled to vote in primary elections if they will reach the regular age of majority, 18, before the general election.
The age of majority will always be a matter of judgment, and Connecticut law long has been schizophrenic about it. In most respects Connecticut considers people 18 and older to be adults, but not for purchasing alcoholic beverages, cigarettes, and marijuana, where the legal age is 21. While of course some people 21 and older are still irresponsible with those controlled substances, the line has to be drawn somewhere.
But it should be drawn with some consistency and justice, not just according to political convenience and correctness.
Fifty-five years ago when the country had a military draft that conscripted young men at age 18 and sent them into a stupid and unpopular war in Asia, it was easy to see the injustice of voting and drinking ages set at 21, three years above the age of military service. So most people came to agree that if one was old enough to fight for one’s country, one was old enough to vote and buy a beer.
But then the draft and the war ended, the country got ambivalent about the drinking age, and by federal law in 1984 it was raised to 21. This was acknowledgment of the obvious: that wisdom and personal responsibility tend to increase with age. But it was also acknowledgment that the country wanted young people to be smarter about drinking than voting.
The seeming contradictions in Democratic positions on the age of majority in Connecticut don’t arise from any thoughtful evaluation of the risks involved in each matter.
As the party of liberalism, Democrats are simply less inclined to hold people responsible for themselves and their misconduct. Indeed, there is reason to be sympathetic to the many young men who come out of a welfare system that destroys the family and leaves so many boys to be raised without fathers and thus without the necessary manners and restraint.
It’s not clear how the Democratic Party came to its stark contradictions about the age of majority. It’s certainly not libertarianism, since the Democrats long have been the party of ever-more pervasive government and now have become the party of policing speech and thought as well.
Democrats would not have 15- or even 20-year-olds drinking or smoking. But the party seems to consider abortions and sex-change therapy for minors to be matters of self-discovery in which parents are interlopers but abortion and sex-change doctors are not, even as those doctors take custody of and operate on children who are not their own, a gross conflict of interest.
But then parenting seems to be failing generally quite apart from the pernicious influence of the welfare system.
For example, New Haven lately has had a controversy over downtown “juice bars,” regular alcoholic beverage bars where minors are served non-alcoholic beverages in a separate section of the facility.
Last Halloween thousands of young people, many under 18, gathered at downtown juice bars in New Haven, overwhelming police and causing fights. Four people were shot.
Now people are clamoring for city government to close the “juice bars” to “protect our kids,” as if their own parents can’t be bothered to keep them home.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 