Your average 13-year-old is able to understand a lot, if you give her the information. Parents do tend to influence their children’s political views, it’s hard not to. I encourage my kids to think for themselves, but I also express my views and they listen to that too. I do not doubt that this occurs all across the political spectrum. It’s not brainwashing, it’s parents teaching their kids what they think is right.

On what grounds, exactly, would one forbid 13-year-olds from having and expressing political opinions? Certainly not on the grounds that they cannot comprehend events; that would be a dangerous argument, especially when one considers that instruction manuals for installing childseats in cars had been written at a tenth-grade reading level, which proved too difficult for most people to understand, and are now being rewritten at a fifth-grade level. Correct me if I’m wrong, but fifth-graders would be 11, right?

So if you silenced that part of the population with reading abilities (and, I would guess, cognitive abilities) that had petrified when they were 13 or below, that would exclude a large segment of the population from political participation and expression, on both the left and the right.