Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 11, 1993 TAG: 9302100109
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
KIDS COUNT AT TAX TIME AND NOT ELECTION TIME
Q: Why aren't children allowed to vote, even by parental proxy?A: The idea of giving children the vote has been floated most recently by Paul Peterson, a Harvard government professor. He argues that enfranchising children might help stem the growing poverty rate among kids. The rationale is that the government responds to needs according to who has political power; the elderly, who vote in high numbers, have seen their share of federal spending dramatically increase in recent decades, and poverty among the elderly has gone from 35 percent in 1959 to 12 percent in 1990.
He figures that parents could cast proxy votes for their kids. And besides, "If you ask most people questions about politics the responses they give to you are generally speaking no better than what fairly young children can say about politics. There is no magic knowledge that people acquire at the age of 18 that makes them informed voters."
Indeed, if reasoned judgments were necessary for voting in this country, we'd have to disenfranchise most of the adult population.
Obviously, the government is not about to give kids the vote, nor has any other nation. But kids are counted as fully human when it comes to establishing congressional districts by population.
This raises a question: What, exactly, is a child? Do parents own their children? (This is what we do in this column: Fearlessly ask the dumb interrogative.)
"This is not an institution of slavery," answers Howard Davidson, a lawyer who works on children's rights. But he adds that, historically, children were viewed somewhat like chattel. They were handy around the farm and the coal mine and so forth, he says. "Children represented a cost benefit to their families because they could go out and work at a very young age."
Nowadays, we're more sophisticated. We don't see children as an investment, exactly. We see them as a tax deduction.\ \ The Mailbag:
The Marines are after us. In a recent column about why the Marine Corps is considered a separate military service, we wrote that the Marines were "established in 1798." An anonymous former Marine writes, "You will memorize the following fact: The Marines were established in 1775, not 1798. This information will be disseminated in your next article." (Do we detect an authoritarian tone there?)
Here's the deal: The Continental Congress on Nov. 10, 1775, authorized the commissioning of two battalions of American Marines. That's the day celebrated as the birthday of the Marines, even though the Marines were a small and scattershot force during the Revolutionary War, with, by one estimate, only one major, 30 captains, 100 lieutenants and perhaps 2,000 enlisted men. There was no Marine Corps. The Corps was, in fact, established on July 11, 1798 by an act of Congress (our source being J. Robert Moskin's book "The U.S. Marine Corps Story," specifically the chapter "Establishing the Corps, 1798-1815").
Washington Post Writers Group
Joel Achenbach writes for the Style section of The Washington Post.