The article expresses disapproval about the corruption of the judge and the severity of the sentence, but seems completely unfazed by the idea of an American citizen standing before a judge to answer for a satirical website. And this is actually understandable given the context. While children’s rights law is a notoriously murky area, it seems fair to say that children’s “individual rights” (free speech, due process, etc.) are generally thin to nonexistent, certainly in the US and probably elsewhere too. So for example, if Ms. Transue had been punished by her school rather than a court for setting up her website, it probably wouldn’t even have been news.
The law strikes me as inconsistent in its attitude toward minors: first it denies them individual rights, on the ground that they’re not yet capable of exercising moral judgment. But then it punishes them harshly for all sorts of offenses (in many cases more harshly than adults), thereby presupposing the moral responsibility they’re not yet supposed to have.
[...]
I think our culture’s insistence on treating children as children even after those children are ready to be treated as adults is
1. weird from the standpoint of anthropology and evolutionary psychology,
2. an excellent prescription for turning out adults who still think the way children are supposed to,
3. a useful tool for cracking down on unwanted precocity of all kinds, and
4. a terrific way to make up for the unfortunate encroachments these past few centuries of justice, civilized behavior, and protections for the nerdy and weak, by keeping human beings in such a savage environment for the first years of their lives that by the time they’re let out, the new Enlightenment nonsense has difficulty gaining a foothold.
Again, read the whole thing: he identifies several objections to lowering the voting age, and demolishes them one after another.
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