I remember when I used to think that it was a brilliant idea to let 16 and 17 year olds vote. No, seriously thought this was a good thing. Suddenly, I grew up and I had to deal with life. Stress, failure, rejection, deadlines, teamwork, living away from home, having to let go of some of my dreams, having to go back to college... these were all learning experiences for me. Now I think the voting age should be raised to 25. There. I said it. But I can compromise: we can raise it to 30.

Look, even the smartest and most practical teenagers still don’t understand how the world works. You have to experience it to learn. That includes being away from your parents for a while, having to earn money, experiencing failure now and then and learning from failure and getting rejected, be it for a job or for a relationship. Some teenagers who what’s going on, and I commend them for it, but those teenagers are the minority. Tiny minority. In fact, so many adults don’t know what’s going on. It’s good that teenagers are interested in politics, but they should use all the time they need to learn about politics before getting a vote. Which will take many years.

Looking at some of the posts on the link, I agree that gay and bisexual teenagers should get out there and get some experience in the real world instead of using the internet for information. When I was 15, I was curious about homosexuality so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Naturally, it fed me a lot of bullshit about how there are more than two genders, how transgenderism is real and how evil western civilisation is. Well, the last one is partly true, because it makes its inhabitants hate themselves and become slaves to consumerism. I wished I never went on Wikipedia. I still didn’t realise I was gay until I was weeks away from turning 18, and it wasn’t because I was on Wikipedia. All it did was make me more confused and it probably delayed my ability to come out.