By Donnie Hall
If it wasn’t hard enough for a kid to be a kid these days, count on elected officials and special interests to make it even harder by setting all kind of different ages to separate childhood from maturity.
The law says that you automatically become an adult at age 18. By in large, this is true. At 18, one is considered: independent from his or her parents, capable of entering into legal agreements, an adult in criminal or civil proceedings, and competent to make life-impacting decisions and render consent in many matters. One day younger and the person remains a child for legal purposes, and thus, not competent under the law to make decisions without parental assistance unless the decision is to obtain an abortion. Here the underage girl may or may not be considered capable of making such an important decision depending on the state of residence.
This is not the end of the story.
One can commit to entering the military at 17 and under Obamacare, a young adult remains in a dependency relationship for medical purposes with his or her parents until age 26.
Importantly, that same adult is not allowed to decide to purchase alcohol, in all states, pot where legal, or tobacco products in many states until age 21. In Washington State the tobacco age is currently 18, but many in Olympia are pushing it to 21.
There are advocates of raising the purchase age even higher, arguing that the higher the age, the less likely it is that an individual will ever take up any one of these bad habits.
Now, in Washington state, one can register to vote by age 16 although not actually allowed to vote until age 18 (How will that be enforced?). The reasoning behind this new law? You guessed it: to facilitate more people taking up the good habit of voting. Notice a pattern here?
These laws seem to be driven by social engineering goals more than the status of mental and emotional maturity of our youth. Now, there is a movement nationwide to restrict gun ownership to adults aged 21 or older. The social engineering aspects of proposed law in this vein are manifest. Raise the age as a way of raising the barriers to gun ownership much as was done with alcohol, etc.
The problem with this social engineering is that it is experimenting with people’s lives, literally. A 20 year old woman estranged from a violent husband or boyfriend may want and need more protection that a piece of paper from the court. Normally considered an adult, the social justice engineers would mandate that she be treated as a kid and take this bit of protection away in the name of protecting the children.
Let us let adults be adults and competent to make all adult decisions.
(Donnie Hall serves as the CCRP State Committeeman.)
