Posted by Psilocybin at 1:28pm Apr 14 '12Today, April 14, is not only Inner Bruise Day, but also National Youth Roghts Day.
In honor of this holiday, I'd like to post something I wrote on another board about an argument often used by youth rights opponents: "Youth is only temporary".
TeacherOfMillies, a poster at the Fourth Turning board, wrote this at http://www.fourthturning.com/forum/showthread.php?5002-Millennials-and-authority&p=312314#post312314
Here is my response. Please do not rate this post a 3 just because I copied-and-pasted it from the Fourth Turning website; the words are my own and work well as a standalone piece:
First of all, I prefer the term "demographic group". A group does not have to be a minority group to be discriminated against. Males are not a minority group, and the draft discriminates against males. Whites are not a minority group, and affirmative action discriminates against Whites. But males and Whites are demographic groups, and prejudicial treatment against them is discrimination. Discrimination simply means treating someone wrongly because of his or her demographic group. And no one can argue with the fact that teens are a demographic group.
You may say that a person who was born Black could never wake up one day and be White all of a sudden. This is true, but it is not really relevant to the issue of whether discrimination is justified. Exactly how does the temporariness of membership in a group make discrimination defensible? I don't think that if that person became White one day and was finally allowed to vote because of it in the pre-1860's world, he or she would forgive and forget all the needless discrimination in the past!
Also, being mistreated during one's teen-age years will stay with a person for life. Your world does not become a clean slate again once you reach the legal age to do something; rather, the pain of discrimination from the past carries on. Since I was 6, I suffered from a mental disorder called logaesthesia, where I taste words and have the sensations of swallowing them. The words I don't like I have to "purge" out by scraping my nails against my groin and then "vomiting" them up by carrying my nails over my abdomen, chest and throat. All the "socialization" I received in high school, all the being forced to do things, all the fascist comments that my behavior was "inappropriate" or "socially unacceptable", haunt me to this very day. I'm 30 now. Every day I have flashbacks, I bite myself, I slam my fist against my head, I yell, from what people told me about my condition. If I had only been given the chance to stop going to school, to live away from my parents, to move to Berkeley, I may have been able to get away from it before too much damage was done.
And what if your parents take you to get a circumcision before you are old enough to legally say no to an operation? Your foreskin isn't going to magically grow back once you reach the age of medical consent (which varies from 14 to 18 depending on your jurisdiction).
And what if you die during your teens? Then your adolescence will indeed become permanent. If you die before age 18, you will never have the chance to vote for or against a president. If you abided by the law stating no one is to drink alcohol until his or her twenty-first birthday, then you got drafted and went to war rather than dodging the draft, and got killed in war at the age of 20, you would die without ever having the chance to try alcohol. You think a belated "sorry" is going to make that OK?
Thirdly, lost time is never found again. Suppose you could make a good decision as to whom to vote for at the age of 15, but did not get to vote until 18. And suppose it was in your genes to die at the age of 80. Do you really think God is going to magically add 3 more years at the end of your life to make up for it so you live to be 83 instead of 80? Every second of life is sacred.
Fourthly, ethnicity is the platonic prototype of a demographic variable and racism for discrimination, and every other demographic variable about humans has something about it that makes it different from race and unique from other demographic variables. Gender, for instance, is an objective and universally recognized trait. Someone's race may be labeled as "Black" in Cuba and "Hispanic" in the United States. In some societies, having sex with another person of your gender automatically makes you gay, whereas in other societies, it is viewed as natural to experiment even if you are straight. The legal ages for things differ from country to country. Someone with epilepsy is viewed as disabled in modern countries but as having special, supernatural powers in the Hmong culture. But everywhere around the world, someone with a penis is a male and someone with a vagina is a female. (There are special gender categories, such as the berdaches or the Thai kathoey, in a few cultures, but even then the person's real, biological gender is still acknowledged.)
Unlike other demographic variables, people choose their religion. No one chooses to be male, or Chinese, or disabled, or gay, or 23 years old. But people have control over what religion they practice, and this makes religion different.
Sexual orientation is different because it revolves around certain behaviors, and behaviors that certain factions and individuals believe are immoral at that. No one gets arrested just because they are African-American, or female, or teen-age. No one believes that blind people will burn in Hell. But many nations still have sodomy laws on the books making gay sex illegal (this included several U.S. states as late as 2003). Many churches teach that LGBT people will burn in Hell after they die. There are no controversial behaviors that are defining of Blackness, or defining of womanhood, or defining of adolescence.
Disability is different because a disability can render someone by definition unable to do something. An example would be paraplegics being unable to do work that requires you to walk on feet. Men are generally stronger than women, but there are amazonian women and plenty of weak men. Stating that 20-year-olds are too immature to drink but 21-year-olds are mature enough to drink is a loose generalization. The average IQ of African-Americans is lower than that of Whites, which is in turn lower than the average IQ of Asians, but you find bright people and dim people in all racial groups. But blind people driving? This form of discrimination based on disability is recognized as "bona fide discrimination", and actually is legal in some places.
Every rights movement has its own hurdles to overcome, and people who shout, "But this is different!" cause every rights movement to have to start at square one (a good example is [private] Luther King's niece who fights against the gay rights movement and argues that homosexuality threatens family values and therefore cannot be compared to the Civil Rights movement). How would you like it, for instance, if people who thought that women shouldn't have rights argued that gender was determined objectively and universally and therefore laws that treat women as inferior weren't really discrimination?
In honor of this holiday, I'd like to post something I wrote on another board about an argument often used by youth rights opponents: "Youth is only temporary".
TeacherOfMillies, a poster at the Fourth Turning board, wrote this at http://www.fourthturning.com/forum/showthread.php?5002-Millennials-and-authority&p=312314#post312314
Adina: Recognizing that minors have different capacities from adults and therefore do not deserve the same rights cannot be puot in the same category as racism or sexism. A minority group is a group (such as sex, race or religion) whose membership is normally permanent. People who are born black stay black for life. Adolescence is not permanent. There is no discrimination here.
Here is my response. Please do not rate this post a 3 just because I copied-and-pasted it from the Fourth Turning website; the words are my own and work well as a standalone piece:
First of all, I prefer the term "demographic group". A group does not have to be a minority group to be discriminated against. Males are not a minority group, and the draft discriminates against males. Whites are not a minority group, and affirmative action discriminates against Whites. But males and Whites are demographic groups, and prejudicial treatment against them is discrimination. Discrimination simply means treating someone wrongly because of his or her demographic group. And no one can argue with the fact that teens are a demographic group.
You may say that a person who was born Black could never wake up one day and be White all of a sudden. This is true, but it is not really relevant to the issue of whether discrimination is justified. Exactly how does the temporariness of membership in a group make discrimination defensible? I don't think that if that person became White one day and was finally allowed to vote because of it in the pre-1860's world, he or she would forgive and forget all the needless discrimination in the past!
Also, being mistreated during one's teen-age years will stay with a person for life. Your world does not become a clean slate again once you reach the legal age to do something; rather, the pain of discrimination from the past carries on. Since I was 6, I suffered from a mental disorder called logaesthesia, where I taste words and have the sensations of swallowing them. The words I don't like I have to "purge" out by scraping my nails against my groin and then "vomiting" them up by carrying my nails over my abdomen, chest and throat. All the "socialization" I received in high school, all the being forced to do things, all the fascist comments that my behavior was "inappropriate" or "socially unacceptable", haunt me to this very day. I'm 30 now. Every day I have flashbacks, I bite myself, I slam my fist against my head, I yell, from what people told me about my condition. If I had only been given the chance to stop going to school, to live away from my parents, to move to Berkeley, I may have been able to get away from it before too much damage was done.
And what if your parents take you to get a circumcision before you are old enough to legally say no to an operation? Your foreskin isn't going to magically grow back once you reach the age of medical consent (which varies from 14 to 18 depending on your jurisdiction).
And what if you die during your teens? Then your adolescence will indeed become permanent. If you die before age 18, you will never have the chance to vote for or against a president. If you abided by the law stating no one is to drink alcohol until his or her twenty-first birthday, then you got drafted and went to war rather than dodging the draft, and got killed in war at the age of 20, you would die without ever having the chance to try alcohol. You think a belated "sorry" is going to make that OK?
Thirdly, lost time is never found again. Suppose you could make a good decision as to whom to vote for at the age of 15, but did not get to vote until 18. And suppose it was in your genes to die at the age of 80. Do you really think God is going to magically add 3 more years at the end of your life to make up for it so you live to be 83 instead of 80? Every second of life is sacred.
Fourthly, ethnicity is the platonic prototype of a demographic variable and racism for discrimination, and every other demographic variable about humans has something about it that makes it different from race and unique from other demographic variables. Gender, for instance, is an objective and universally recognized trait. Someone's race may be labeled as "Black" in Cuba and "Hispanic" in the United States. In some societies, having sex with another person of your gender automatically makes you gay, whereas in other societies, it is viewed as natural to experiment even if you are straight. The legal ages for things differ from country to country. Someone with epilepsy is viewed as disabled in modern countries but as having special, supernatural powers in the Hmong culture. But everywhere around the world, someone with a penis is a male and someone with a vagina is a female. (There are special gender categories, such as the berdaches or the Thai kathoey, in a few cultures, but even then the person's real, biological gender is still acknowledged.)
Unlike other demographic variables, people choose their religion. No one chooses to be male, or Chinese, or disabled, or gay, or 23 years old. But people have control over what religion they practice, and this makes religion different.
Sexual orientation is different because it revolves around certain behaviors, and behaviors that certain factions and individuals believe are immoral at that. No one gets arrested just because they are African-American, or female, or teen-age. No one believes that blind people will burn in Hell. But many nations still have sodomy laws on the books making gay sex illegal (this included several U.S. states as late as 2003). Many churches teach that LGBT people will burn in Hell after they die. There are no controversial behaviors that are defining of Blackness, or defining of womanhood, or defining of adolescence.
Disability is different because a disability can render someone by definition unable to do something. An example would be paraplegics being unable to do work that requires you to walk on feet. Men are generally stronger than women, but there are amazonian women and plenty of weak men. Stating that 20-year-olds are too immature to drink but 21-year-olds are mature enough to drink is a loose generalization. The average IQ of African-Americans is lower than that of Whites, which is in turn lower than the average IQ of Asians, but you find bright people and dim people in all racial groups. But blind people driving? This form of discrimination based on disability is recognized as "bona fide discrimination", and actually is legal in some places.
Every rights movement has its own hurdles to overcome, and people who shout, "But this is different!" cause every rights movement to have to start at square one (a good example is [private] Luther King's niece who fights against the gay rights movement and argues that homosexuality threatens family values and therefore cannot be compared to the Civil Rights movement). How would you like it, for instance, if people who thought that women shouldn't have rights argued that gender was determined objectively and universally and therefore laws that treat women as inferior weren't really discrimination?