Counterpoint: Bar Glenn Reynolds and Only Glenn Reynolds From Voting

In 1971, future law professor and opinion columnist Glenn Reynolds turned 11 years old, and the 26th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. Perhaps America was wrong. Perhaps, in addition to lowering the voting age, the 26th Amendment should have included a clause to specifically ban Glenn Reynolds from voting in any election, ever.

The idea, in those Vietnam years, was perhaps buoyed by a mass ignorance that 11-year-old Glenn Reynolds would one day grow up to write an opinion column for USA Today calling for raising the voting age from 18 to 25. Which is turning out to be unfortunate.

You see, if this country had thought to specifically ban Glenn Reynolds from voting, they could have prevented a serious miscarriage of democracy. Because allowing Glenn Reynolds specifically to vote allows somebody eager to broadly paint an entire generation as an oversimplified and convenient caricature to have a hand in guiding the star-spangled schooner we call America. This should not stand.

Consider the stupidity of Reynolds’ latest column, a clumsy, floppy troll published today on USA Today, a newspaper for Comfort Inn guests and idiots whose favorite books are “magazines.”

In it, Reynolds bemoans the unrest occurring at Yale and the University of Missouri, ridiculing the actions of selected protesters. He writes,

This isn’t the behavior of people who are capable of weighing opposing ideas, or of changing their minds when they are confronted with evidence that suggests that they are wrong. It’s the behavior of spoiled children — a characterization that Friedersdorf, perhaps unconsciously, underscores by not reporting the students’ names because, he implies, they are too young to be responsible for their actions. And spoiled children shouldn’t vote.

Reynolds then quotes Reason’s Robby Soave, a gentleman and a scholar with whom I often respectfully disagree, who recently noted that college students who demand safe spaces from opinions that upset them are acting like babies. A fair point. But Reynolds takes it further, joking that those “too fragile to handle different opinions are too fragile to participate in politics.”

To which I say: those too stupid to differentiate between the actions of a privileged few and the ethos of an entire generation containing millions of individuals shouldn’t vote, either. That’s why America needs a constitutional amendment barring Glenn Reynolds from voting.