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What’s in a Number? America Has a Maturity Problem.
Shakespeare asked, “What’s in a name?” I ask, “What’s in a number?”
Particularly, I want to know what chronological age is magical, that which allows you to do something on your birthday that you could not do the day before. If you are 17 you may not vote, you may not buy a long gun, or you may not join the military without permission. But at age 18, in one magical moment, from 11:59 p.m. local time to 12:00 a.m., you have gained the wisdom and the right to do all these things.
While progressives howl at the prospect of an immature young man buying an AR-15, they also tell us that five-year-olds may reject their genitals, that 13-year-olds should be encouraged to use theirs (and the genitals of others) and hide their subsequent abortions from their parents. Oh, and please acknowledge that college-age kids are incapable of acquiring health insurance and should be allowed to sponge off their working moms and dads AND that they were too stupid to understand the terms of their student loans so those must be forgiven.
And yet, while we’re humping and killing and shooting and recklessly spending a fortune on useless university degrees, we have somehow also convinced ourselves that we’re all too young to get married before our mid-thirties.
That tells me we don’t have a numbers problem. We have a maturity problem. And I don’t know how to cure that. As a society, we’re granting feel-good rights too early and postponing real adulthood until it’s almost too late to put it to good use. And for that, we probably deserve all the misery that’s coming our way.
Published in General
Not necessarily. A lot of the problems being identified seem to come from a leftist/feminist agenda along the lines of “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
Or to repeat again a comment by someone else, which I’ve saved for like 3 years now:
Deny married and dependent women the vote and you will see fewer marriages, more single mothers and, where marriage is not dissolved, competition between spouses to be head of household. For what?
As it is, most married women are conservative already and many vote the same way as their husbands anyway. But that is by choice. Remove the choice, and you create conditions that favor the government as husband.
Maybe. But perhaps not so much if women don’t get money and free or subsidized housing, for having children on their own. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I for sure am not arguing that just ONE thing needs to change, that one thing being voting.
If you are going to deny the vote to married and dependent women, you need to deny the vote to ALL women.
Like I said, I’m not opposed to that.
But women will rebel against marriage even more if marriage renders them second class citizens compared to their single sisters. You do not want that.
Well I support limiting the vote to only property owners too. So unless single women are self-supporting and own property – which excludes single mothers getting welfare etc – they still wouldn’t vote. I also favor returning to a much stricter social structure regarding single-motherhood. Maybe single women wouldn’t be so apparently careless about getting pregnant outside of marriage if they were sent to special places for single pregnant women like in the past, rather than being given free housing, food, money… And so forth. It seems like you might be focusing in on a single aspect when it’s a much larger picture.
Single mothers can also be high class feminists that want a kid but never found the “one”.
I don’t know the rate on that, but it’s at least as high as your 14 year old married with a kid.
https://www.singlemothersbychoice.org/
Shame, stigma, etc, used to be very powerful motivators, and arguably should be again.