Burt Prelutsky hopes that teenagers won’t go to the polls:

Whenever I suggest that teenagers shouldn’t be allowed to vote for anything but student body president or prom queen, I know that someone is bound to say, “If they’re old enough to fight and die in Afghanistan and Iraq, they’re old enough to vote.”

To which I invariably respond, “You’re absolutely right. If they’re serving in the military, I agree they should be able to vote. But if they’re still in school, still getting an allowance and using their mom or dad’s credit card to buy gas, I say they have no more business electing the president than my dog Duke does.”

Let’s face it, ladies and gentlemen, if we raised the voting age to, say, 25, the Democratic party would go the way of the dodo and the Whigs. Liberals want young kids voting for pretty much the same cynical reason they want to extend suffrage to illegal aliens, convicted felons and dead people.

It takes a certain mentality, a certain degree of gullibility, after all, to believe plutocrats like the Clintons, the Kerrys, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Michael Bloomberg and George Soros.

I’d expand that to hope that teenagers of all ages stay away from the voting booth.

From Virginia Postrel:

This is not just rude. It’s bad politics. If you want to get Californians to vote against a state-constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, you should keep the obnoxious leftist lawyers out of sight and highlight the happy families–preferably with kids, mothers-in-laws, grandmas, siblings, etc. joining the celebration.

I suspect that California’s gay community is going to ultimately regret this judicial overreach. Particularly if it results in California going to McCain in November.

[9 AM update]

Eugene Volokh has some thoughts on the collision between gay rights and religion:

Instead of gay marriage causing a collision, both gay marriage and religious conflicts with antidiscrimination law are themselves the product of a much larger trend that is moving the tectonic plates of our culture. That trend is the increasingly common view that homosexuality is a natural and harmless variation of human sexuality, that gay people are entitled to be judged on their merits and not on the basis of outdated opprobrium, and that these beliefs should to a significant degree be reflected in law.

Many people in our society object strongly to this trend. I think the law should make room for them to a considerable extent. It should be possible, in particular, to recognize gay marriage and to continue to protect religious faith at least to the extent we have already done so when religious views about marriage diverge from the secular law of marriage. Of course no religion should be required to change its doctrine to recognize gay unions. Of course no religious official should be required to perform a same-sex marriage (or an interracial wedding, as some once did, or a second-marriage wedding, as some do now, or any other wedding he objects to). These things have never been required and nobody is asking that they should be.

While marriage and religious belief are one creature in the minds of many people, they are separate things in the law. Catholicism and Orthodox Judaism, for example, refuse to recognize secular divorce. But few argue that we should refuse to let people divorce for this reason. One can be divorced under the law but married in the eyes of the church. The statuses can be separated without a diminution of religious liberty. And nobody thinks that this de-linking of the two constitutes official oppression or the obliteration of religious freedom. Similarly, in principle, it should be possible to have a regime in which same-sex couples are married under the law but not married in the eyes of a given religion — all without extinguishing religious faith.

A lot of this would go away if the state got out of the marriage business.