Whether it's Attorney General Mike Moore's crackdown on alcohol sales in college towns, Rep. Johnny Reeves' House Bill 841 that would make it illegal for persons under the age of 21 to enter a bar or Rep. Ed Blackmon's House Bill 554 that would lower the legal age for jury duty from 21 to 18, the State of Mississippi continues to send mixed messages to that segment of our population between the ages of 18-21.
Are you kids? Are you adults?
How will the state deal with you?
Are these hybrid rules fair or consistent?
We can't seem to decide in Mississippi exactly what age we believe to be the age of "majority" - or, simply put, the age at which a young person is considered to be adult replete with all the privileges and responsibilities of adulthood. The incongruities in the present laws are seemingly endless.
At 18, you can be convicted of capital murder and sentenced to die by lethal injection at the hands of the state. But you have to be 21 to sit on the grand jury that indicts someone for capital murder or on the petit jury that decides one's guilt or innocence on the charge and that decides the penalty if the verdict is guilty.
At 18, you can wear the uniform of your country and kill or be killed in the service of your country. But if you survive combat and return home from service, you have to be 21 to take a seat in a bar and have a beer with the older vets.
At 18, you can walk into a movie theater and watch scenes of explicit sex in R-rated or NC-17 rated films. But under Mississippi law, you have to be 21 to purchase a video portraying the same basic acts in the so-called "adult" bookstores.
At 18, you can enter into a contract for personal property like a car, but you can't enter into a real estate contract until you're 21 or until you get a court order declaring early majority. Lawyer friends say there are a few other quirks in the laws regarding legal minority and majority. I'll take their word for it.
At 18, you can get a job working 40 hours a week, get married, have children and you will be dealt with as an adult by the State of Mississippi on virtually every issue save the purchase of booze and the entry into certain contracts as an adult.
In our society, we are apparently prepared to sacrifice an 18-year-old in combat, incarcerate him as an adult, execute him as an adult, tax him as an adult, force him to obey the law as an adult, to recognize his right to marry and his status as a legal parent, but we won't sell him a beer or a house.
In response to questions about his HB 841 that would make it illegal for persons under 21 to enter a bar, Reeves told a Jackson newspaper: "I'm hearing from parents who desperately want some people to do something about teens buying beer. You can never have enough (law enforcement) when it comes to protecting children."
That's the $64,000 question, isn't it?
When one considers an 18-year-old in the light of a teenager illegally buying beer from a convenience store clerk at 6 p.m. before getting involved in a tragic traffic accident at 11 p.m., we seek laws to "protect children".
But put a gun in the hand of the same kid and let him shoot that same convenience store clerk dead in the commission of an armed robbery and we seek laws punishing that 18-year-old as an adult - death penalty included.
At some point in our minds as adults - just as at some point in their minds as teenagers - a magic line is crossed between childhood and adulthood. For the teenagers, there are rites of passage that haven't really changed all that much over the years. For the parents of teenagers, there are fears of the consequences of those rites of passage that really haven't changed all that much over the years, either.
Slowing or stopping underage drinking or tobacco consumption is a laudable goal that goes directly to the question of public safety. But the inconsistency with which we deal with older teenagers in Mississippi is one that strains the credibility of adults who insist on teaching young people that there are lines that can't be crossed.
Where are the lines? Is it at age 18? Is it at age 21?
It would seem that we have already decided to place the burden of legal majority on the backs of our 18-year-olds in terms of taxation, the criminal justice system and military service.
If our nation went to war tomorrow, some of the first American casualties would be kids who couldn't buy a beer in Mississippi the day before they shipped out. There's something rather grating about that reality.
Yet at the same time, as a parent I live in fear of getting that phone call - the call that changes one's life in an instant and makes all debate of legal drinking age and the like moot in the face of mind-bending sorrow - and can intellectually capitulate to the hypocrisy of these laws that make second-class citizens of older teenagers out of raw fear of losing even a hair on one particular teenager's head.
Because that is what we're doing, you know. We're asking these very young adults to accept an ambiguous status as older children until such time comes as we send them either to the battlefields or the prisons to accept adult fates.
Eighteen or 21? Pick an age, any age. Just make it consistent.
