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Notes -
Assume that the Congress decides to impose universal age of consent in all states. And pull from their ass the authority to do it. What do you think the current culture war coalitions and factions will push for and will it create intracoallition splits.
Hardline Religious conservatives hard - 21 with exception for marriage
Moderate Religous conservatives - 18
Centrists/liberals - they will look at Europe and see that the world didn't ended and probably say that it is 16 with romeo and juliet clause
Feminists - probably a split here - some will push for maximum, other for 16
Andrew tate fans - hard 14
Anime fans - soft 14
LGBTQ+ - a spectrum based on the how activist they are ranging from 16 to 12.
No idea about how will it go based on race and income
Nobody will be willing to advocate for anything other than 18 with a shotgun wedding exception, most like.
Right now yeah, but as things are I can see some frustrations that might be able to set the stage for future agitation to finally stop the advancing postponement of adulthood. (By the time my sister felt "ready" to have kids she was pressing up against a geriatric pregnancy.) Right now the biggest rhetorical weapon against young adults is this idea that your brain isn't finished developing until 25.
Maybe more research discovers that this delayed development is of no real use. Maybe we recognize that most things we ask adults to take responsibility for do not require that your brain reach some state we can only even notice with brain scans. Maybe we suddenly remember that, oh, not long after 25 your brain starts un-developing and we don't gradually strip legal privileges of people as they age (unless it causes the failure of some qualification, e.g. driver's license, but age will not per se disqualify you!).
I think treating it as any kind of unary scalar variable is just wrong. Yes, young brains may be more agile, but that's not the only metric that matters. E.g. kids are awesome at learning new stuff, especially stuff like languages, but their brains are a disaster (from adult's perspective) in many other regards. I don't think there is also an objective metric for this possible - it is rooted very deep in the culture. You can't just treat an outcome of several layers of cultural trends as a free parameter that you could move around at will, this will get you a lot of angry people who would (somewhat deservedly) think you're messing with the basic foundations of their world view just out of pure satanic contrarianism.
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