Posted by Psilocybin at 10:31pm Apr 14 '185. No one has ever produced any really convincing evidence that youth are inferior.
In the free world, proponents of freedom do not to have to prove that granting a freedom will provide a spectacular benefit to society; the burden of proof is on those who argue that a freedom should be restricted. For example, I do not have to advance a killer argument on why people should be allowed to eat hamburgers and how burgerophagy can benefit society in order for eating a Big Mac to be legal; rather, eating hamburgers should remain legal until those wishing to take away that freedom can credibly demonstrate why eating hamburgers is wrong and dangerous.
If ageism were good and right, one would expect that the youth rights opponents would have put forth a moon-hanging demonstration that people under a certain age are immature, irresponsible, not worthy of rights, etc. But all they have been able to come up with are vague statements that "they're just not mature enough", anecdotal examples of teen-age immaturity, circular and etiam in libris appeals to other ageist laws, deceptively manipulated statistics about how raising the drinking age has "saved lives", and junk science about adolescent brains.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) likes to tout the claim that raising the drinking age from 21 to 18 has "saved lives", and argue that the statistics prove it, insinuating that 20-year-olds are too immature to drink responsibly. Closer analyses of the statistics, though, make the case against MADD's claim. The early research that led to the adoption of the Federal Uniform Drinking Age Act (FUDAA) examined only the states that lowered the age of their own accord before the 21 drinking age went federal, and came too early to examine the states that were coerced to raise their ages under FUDAA. Furthermore, traffic fatality rates rose from 1913 (the earliest year statistics were recorded) until 1969, after which point they began dropping. They even dropped in the early seventies, as states were lowering their drinking ages from 21 to 19 or 18. MADD mentions that after FUDAA passed in 1984, driving fatalities decreased, but this is a canard, as they had already been dropping for years. A 1987 study by Peter Asch and David Levy concluded that by the time all but two states had raised their drinking ages to 21, drunk driving fatalities among 18-to-20-year-olds fell, but those among 21-to-24-year-olds actually rose. They conclude that inexperience with drinking regardless of age is the culprit for driving while intoxicated, not being under the magical age of 21. Other factors than FUDAA had a probable effect on drunk driving fatalities in the eighties: for instance, New York became the first state to make seatbelt use mandatory in 1984 and other states followed; legal BAC's went down that same decade; and Candy Lightner's foundation of MADD in 1980 helped frame drunk driving as a real evil in the public's mind; before that, drunk driving was viewed by society as a minor offense that could be laughed off. Dan Fogelberg's song "Same Auld Lang Syne", released that same year, sings, "We bought a six-pack at the liquor store/And we drank it in her car". When George W. Bush was arrested for drunk driving in 1976, he paid only a $150 fine and had his license suspended for a mere 30 days. The average age at which Americans started drinking decreased from 16.6 in 1984 (the year of FUDAA) to 16.2 in 2002, showing how dubious MADD's assumption "higher drinking age -> teens obeying higher drinking age -> less teen drinking -> fewer accidents caused by young and immature drivers" is. Pete Lorenzo has examined the flaws of the 21 proponents in his excellent blog http://21debunked.blogspot.com/.
Starting in the 1990's, it became fashionable for neurologists to argue that teens had "underdeveloped" brains, and that this was to blame for all the terrible, horrible things teens do. However, in a 2007 Scientific American article titled "The Myth of the Teen Brain", psychologist Robert Epstein debunks this "cerebral determinism". As Epstein points out, the studies that examine adolescent brains, teen-age pathologies, and teen angst do not distinguish cause from effect. Teen-age ills are caused by the restrictions on youth and segregation of teens from adults that got started in the early twentieth century. Teens in preindustrial societies do not show high rates of crime, and spend most of their time with adults. They do not feel teen angst. When Western-style schooling and television are brought to these societies, the adolescent members of these now Westernized societies begin to exhibit delinquency and teen angst. The Inuit living on Victoria Island, Canada had no problem with juvenile delinquency until their community was Westernized in the eighties, and by 1988 they had established their first permanent police department now that the worms had escaped from the can. Epstein also points out that brain imaging studies show only a correlation between age and brain anatomy, not a causal relationship. A 2017 study from Penn State University showed that in Taiwan, crime was at its highest among people in their late twenties and early thirties, not those in their teens and early twenties as in the United States. This all suggests that teen-age pathologies are sociogenic, rather than part of a natural timetable of human development. Nightvid Cole, analyzing a study that compared the abilities of 11-to-13-year-olds, 14-to-15-year-olds, 16-to-17-year-olds and 18-to-24-year-olds to pass the MacArthur Judgment Evaluation (an evaluation used by courts in determining whether a defendant is fit to stand trial), points out that "the population mean for the 11-13 year olds is less than one standard deviation below the adult mean in all three areas" (understanding, reasoning, and appreciation). And, most surprising of all: a 2009 study by Dr. Gregory S. Berns showed that teens who participated in such risk-taking acts as drinking, toking, sniffing glue, staying out late, rollerblading, overeating, leaving school, and having unprotected sex had more adult-like white matter in their brains than their straight-arrow peers. While the orthodoxy in the 1970's was that the brain reached its adult state at 18, and in the 1990's the line changed to "The brain isn't fully developed until 25", research in the 2010's now reveals that a person's brain in fact continues to develop and change for her/his whole life.
Indeed, youth rights opponents rely largely on trite but shoddy arguments for the anti-YR position, such as "Being a minor is only temporary", "You can wait", "16-year-olds will vote like their parents", "Young people think they're immortal", "I supported youth rights when I was younger but then outgrew that position", "You'll change your mind when you're older", "The only adults who still support youth rights are pedophiles", "If 16-year-olds are deemed incapable of signing a contract, how can they be mature enough to vote?" (the de jure fallacy), "My house, my rules", "Emancipation will solve everything", "Kids aren't oppressed -- they don't have to pay bills", "Teens were eating Tide Pods a week ago", statements beginning "Society has decided . . .", and the red herring question "Bah, what about child labor?" If there's truly a good case that teens don't deserve more rights, I haven't heard it.
6. Youth rights are in keeping with the U.S. Constitution.
There is nothing in the Constitution that says the First Amendment applies only to people above a certain age. While some specific ages, such as 21 (later 18) to vote or 35 to become president, are enumerated in the Constitution, this does not apply to the Bill of Rights (except perhaps for gun ownership under the Second Amendment, with the ownership of guns being traditionally tied to suffrage and jury duty in Anglo-American law, although whether the Second Amendment actually gives individuals the right to own a gun is a sticky issue that we won't get into here). The Constitution may not state that restricting drinking or voting by age is unconstitutional, but there is not a single word in either the original Constitution or its amendments that states that the law is exempt from granting certain people freedom of speech, freedom of religion, or freedom of press based on age.
Youth rights opponents like to argue that under the Constitution, minors are an "extension" of their parents, just as African-American slaves were an extension of their slavemasters and married women an extension of their husbands when the United States was first founded, and that a minor only has a right if her/his parents want her/him to. They argue that these people were not "persons" when the Constitution was written, and since people under the current ages of emancipation (18, 19, etc.) in their respective states haven't been emancipated by either legislation or a Supreme Court decision, they're still not persons. This may have been the case when this country was founded, but in 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, which spelled out that all people are persons: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are cxtizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside". It is also worth noting that the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolishes slavery. What is slavery? The institution of human beings as property. It actually became unconstitutional in the 1860's, by the word of the Constitution, for women to be property of their husbands, or for minors to be property of their parents, even if the states and Supreme Court did not recognize it yet.
Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas wrote in the majority opinion for Tinker v. Des Moines that: "In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school as well as out of school are 'persons' under our Constitution." Sadly, Fortas' statement that speech that "materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others is, of course, not immunized by the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech" stabbed a loophole in the fabric of students' rights, a hole that grew and grew as subsequent cases ate away at First Amendment rights in school. Warren Burger's majority opinion in Bethel School District v. Fraser (1986), for instance, revolved around a social conformism not grounded in the Constitution: "The undoubted freedom to advocate unpopular and controversial views in schools and classrooms must be balanced against the society's countervailing interest in teaching students the boundaries of socially appropriate behavior". Before she was appointed to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor wrote at a 2008 Second Circuit Court of Appeals case on free speech at school that although she recognized Tinker as a precedent, schools have an obligation to foster such "shared values" as a "proper respect for authority". As far as the Constitution is concerned, she pulled that out of thin air. The reason students' rights are violated is not that the Constitution, as written, says they don't have rights, but that judges arbitrarily disregard the Constitution when it comes to students' rights they may not like.
7. Youth rights has worked where it has already been tried.
Since Austria lowered its voting age to 16 in 2007, 16-to-17-year-olds have been more likely to come to the polls than 18-to-20-year-olds. When Norway set its voting age for local elections to 16 in 2011, 58% of 16- and 17-year-olds voted, a little lower than the general turnout of 63%, but still higher than the 46% of 18-to-20-year-olds. When Scotland first extended the vote to 16-year-olds for its Independence Referendum in 2014, over 40% of 16- and 17-year-olds intended to vote differently from Mom and/or Dad -- confounding the platitude that 16-year-olds "will vote like their parents". A mere 7% of these 16-and-17-year-olds had never talked with anyone about the Independence Referendum. Scotland has also had an age of majority and age of emancipation of 16 since 1991, and while many Americans might imagine chaos has been beset upon Scotland by savage teens without their parents to restrain them, by all accounts it hasn't.
The concept of adolescence is only a little over a century old. For most of history, people went immediately from being a child to being an adult -- the teen-ager as we understand the concept today originated in the 1920's, while the word "teen-ager" was not coined until the 1940's. In the 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables, Anne is considered an adult as soon as she turns 16. (See the paragraph about adolescent brains above for adolescents in traditional societies around the world today.)
In centuries past, what did people whom we would call teen-agers today do? They plotted anabases and katabases and became martyrs for Christianity. Joan of Arc was 17 when she led the French army, and was auto-da-féd at 19.
Although such accomplishments as Jordan Romero's climbing Mt. Everest at 13, Louis Braille's inventing a writing system for the blind at 14, or Malala Yousafzai's winning a Nobel Peace Prize at 17 may be the results of them being exceptional people, not necessarily representing the norm for teen-agers, historical evidence suggests that even random, ordinary teens will rise to the challenge when the situation demands it. When Alexander the Great's father Philip left the 16-year-old Alexander as regent, Alexander, not yet 17, drove the Thracians out of Macedonia and founded Alexandropolis. Philip was a king, mind you, so Alexander the Great was in this position not by merit, but by the accidents of genealogy. If only exceptional teen-agers could handle such tasks, it would seem statistically unlikely that a 16-year-old boy who was pushed into this position by circumstances rather than great inborn abilities would have handled it so well.
Cont'd - Psilocybin