There’s another log on the fire on a topic I’d been meaning to blog about: majority. At what age do we consider people adults?
A few weeks back, NRO Corner had some posts about restoring the drinking age to 18, a proposal to which I’d raise my glass. About the same time, the VT killer had his little tantrum, and the nation got roped into viewing 20-year-old victims as mere children. Now a moonbat wants to raise to 21 the "age for participating in the making of erotic imagery." Yep, girls going wild is now a national crisis.
OTB eviscerates:
Still, the idea that a 20-year-old woman isn’t responsible for the consequences getting drunk and flashing her private parts for a strange man with a camera — and then signing a consent form — is hard to swallow.
Note: Poor choice of words when discussing drunken 20-year-old girls.
For one thing, plenty of women are mothers by that age, responsible for the welfare of helpless infants. Surely, that’s a notch or two higher on the difficulty scale than remembering to keep one’s shirt pulled down? Indeed, it was not all that long ago that girls were getting married and having children at 13 and 14.
While we’re on the subject of child bearing, we should recall that girls well under 18 are permitted to have abortions every day, even without parental notification. For that matter, they’re allowed to bring their child to term and give them up for adoption. Or, for that matter, to keep the child and raise it to adulthood. Either way, those decisions will "follow them around for life," too.
I’m not the first to point out the incongruity of people being eligible to join the military at 18 and yet deeming them insufficiently responsible to make other choices until 21. Until we abolished the peacetime draft, we routinely conscripted men into service at 18. The average age of the soldiers we sent to Vietnam was 19. Far more of the U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq were 21 or younger (974 of them as of March 24), than any other age bracket. Jessica Lynch was 19 when she was taken prisoner. Audie Murphy was 20 on the day he earned the Medal of Honor.
America does not need to raise the legal age for anything. It needs to raise expectations regarding the behavior of some over-indulged young adults.
