Daily Archives: 7 December 2022

Voting as a Teaching Tool

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The Boston City Council has approved a petition to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in city elections. The city council’s next move is to submit its petition to the Massachusetts legislature for enactment. It’s the council’s rationalization for the move that’s instructive.

Progressive members of the City Council argued that lowering the voting age would help young people build a habit of voting and make them more likely to continue being politically engaged later in life.

And this:

When it comes to making a decision as to who’s going to represent them [16- and 17-year-olds], that has been denied to them.

This, especially, is egregiously misleading. Those children have parents representing them. Those parents vote. Those parents are the source of instruction.

Never mind, though. Voting isn’t important in choosing our political leaders. Nobody teaches American history in grade school anymore, apparently, or Civics in junior high, or Western Civilization at any age. No, voting has no importance beyond teaching children a measure of responsibility, because schools also seem to lack any other tools for teaching them ethics (Aristotle, anyone?) or morality (Aesop, or religion, maybe?).

Sure.

An Excellent Response

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Last Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for 303 Creative LLC v Elenis, a case centered on Web Page designer Lorie Smith and her First Amendment right to not put messages on her designs that conflict with her religious beliefs.

In the course of those arguments, there occurred this exchange (audio is at the first link above) between newly confirmed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Kristen Kellie Waggoner, CEO, President, and General Counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing Smith in this case:

[Jackson] asked about a situation where a Christmas photo company was recreating old-time pictures and as a result they only allowed white children to participate because it accurately reflects the time period. As part of the hypothetical, the company served Black people for other types of photos and would refer them to other vendors if they desired. Jackson asked if this would be acceptable under Smith’s logic, because by forcing the photographer to take Black customers it would be changing their vision and forcing them to create something they do not want to create.
“…there are difficult lines to draw and that may be an edge case, but this is not. We have a creative—a creator of speech and a very clear message—”

It’s about time lawyers stopped being afraid to call out activist judges and Justices’ dumbass cynical quibbling over corner cases and kept them focused on the matter actually before them.