Audio By Carbonatix
The Arizona State Legislature has declared war on teenagers. A slew of bills introduced this session are aimed at eliminating the rights of nonadults to buy records, play loud music and drive cars. Capitol observers say they’ve never seen such an assault on youth’s right to self-indulgent self-expression.
In a state where youth seemingly is heading to hell in a handbasket–if you go by gang violence, substance abuse, humiliating school dropout rates, rampant teen pregnancy and rowdy weekend behavior in general–get-tough legislation is a natural. This spring teens and their passions are a hot topic in the legislature, a body made otherwise impotent by endless intramural bickering over rarefied ideological postures and poses.
“We have a lot of legislators who I think are out of touch, there’s no doubt about it,” says Alan Stephens, minority (Democrat) leader in the Senate. “These people are interested in weird bills, anything to ignore the real issues of the day. When you talk about Martin Luther King, or transportation funding, tax increases or prioritizing the budget, they’re all hiding under their desks.”
From the perspective of your average peeping-over-the-desktop legislator, teens are the perfect nonconstituency. Kids don’t read the papers, they don’t write letters, don’t hire lobbyists, don’t testify at committee hearings and they don’t vote. In the eyes of the law (and especially lawmakers), they are defenseless.
“One of the ironies of the law is, there isn’t much protection against age discrimination unless it’s in employment, and then it doesn’t apply unless you’re over forty,” says Louis Rhodes, director of the Arizona affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. “I think a lot of it is gang-related. I think a lot of it has to do with drugs and alcohol in our society. We’re increasingly wanting to control people’s behavior, and it’s very visible and easy to do by age category.
“All it’s doing is creating a separate class of citizenship for these individuals who happen to be under a certain age. By the time you get to be 21, at the rate we’re going, almost every kid is going to have some kind of record.”
From the perspective of a soon-to-be-more-regulated teenager, the legislature is swinging its statutory scythe with way too much vigor. “The adults of our society feel they’re losing control over us,” says Elic Bramlett, one of a classroom full of advanced-placement history students at Cortez High School interviewed for this story. “They feel we’re going to pot, that there’s no future for today’s youth. They feel they’re losing control, and they feel they have to make more laws.”
Following is a list of the teen-bashing bills that have made the capitol scene this spring. Jan Brewer’s music-censorship bill, which set the session’s moral agenda, went away last week, but its pedantic legacy remains in the form of several more bills designed to make teenagers miserable. The biggest grouping of anti-youth legislation blasts away at a kid’s most precious legal possession, the inalienable right to drive a car as wildly as possible at all times.
By far the gnarliest element of House Bill 2131 would limit legal driving hours for everyone under eighteen. No longer would it be lawful for teens to cruise after midnight on weeknights, 1 a.m. on weekends. Several exceptions are written into the rule, and kids en route between home and work or participating in school-related functions are excused.
This legislation mandates that drivers age sixteen to eighteen get a “provisional” driver’s license, but only after passing a driver-education class. The license would be automatically suspended after two moving traffic violations or a DUI conviction. Currently, teens are treated like adults, who accrue points against their license for movers, but who get to keep driving until they rack up eight points in one year–a total that could amount to as many as four or five moving violations.
“I’m a strict disciplinarian,” says Jim Miller, the Phoenix Republican who sponsored the bill, “and I see no reason for sixteen- and seventeen-year-old kids . . . to be out at two or three in the morning.”
Miller expects some resistance to the bill’s curfew clause in the Senate, where it headed after passing out of the House last Thursday, but he’s confident that Arizona’s junior motorists will soon be getting much-needed mandatory training. “The main gist of this bill is to save these young people’s lives, so they know that the automobile is a killing machine,” he says. “The support I’m getting from parents is terrific.”
The response Miller might get from most teens is less so. “They’re doing this, in a way, because maybe they’re jealous,” says John Nelson, Cortez High history student. “Sure, they cruised Central, maybe, if they were here. . . . But they don’t want us to have something better than they had in their teenage years.”
House Bill 2370 ties kids’ driver’s-license rights to school attendance. Dropouts would have to forfeit their licenses, though exemptions would be made for teens enrolled in equivalency programs or those (un)fortunate few who have to work to support families.
Bev Hermon, a Tempe Republican and chair of the House Education Committee, is the sponsor of the bill, which was altered significantly last week by an amendment written by Phoenix Democrat Art Hamilton, who wants to legally mandate that teens attend school until they’re eighteen. Now, kids can quit when they turn sixteen. The Hamilton add-on might make the bill a tougher sell in the Senate.
“Most people like the bill, and I’ve got a lot of unsolicited calls from the general public at large,” says Hermon. “It’s an inexpensive way to keep the casual dropout in school. [For] the kid who has a job, who’s working to support a car, who would like a VCR, would like a videocam, who would prefer to be out there working, school has lost its relevance. That’s different. That’s the hard-core dropout.”
This year’s omnibus drunk-driving bill, House Bill 2433, establishes a tougher standard of drunkenness for teens than the one applied to adults. A twenty-year-old driver found to have a blood-alcohol content of .03 percent–literally a trace finding–will be treated on a equal basis legally as a 22-year-old who blows a .20. The current standard for intoxication (in drinking drivers of all ages) is .10, though sponsors of this bill hope to lower that standard as well, to .08.
“If I’m twenty years old and eleven months, and if I get caught after drinking one beer and I haven’t had anything to eat, a month later I’d have to have four or five beers [to achieve the same severity of punishment],” says Democratic leader Stephens. “What is the point? This is an anti-youth bill, very obviously. We’re looking at punitive measures to try to get correct behavior, or motivate kids, and I’m not sure that works.”
Sue Laybe, a Democrat from a central Phoenix district, introduced House Bill 2141 after hearing more than 100 gripes from constituents concerning cruisers on Central Avenue. “A driver of a vehicle shall not operate or permit the operation of any sound amplification system which can be heard outside the vehicle from fifty or more feet,” Laybe’s law will say. Exemptions are written for emergency vehicles, utility trucks, and vehicles “used for advertising, in a parade or in a political or other special event.”
Unlike some of the other fun-killing bills, the one–incorrectly labeled “the `boom box’ bill”–has had some organized opposition. Predictably, that opposition has come from the manufacturers and retailers who provide the heart-stopping sound systems.
“There seems to be a lot of paranoia about this bill,” Laybe says. “That bothers me. . . . All I’m trying to do is get the noise out of the neighborhoods.”
The two-store chain of Audio Images sound shops, prompted by a national organization of auto-audio legal eagles, has attempted to rally popular opposition against Laybe’s bill. The stores have leafleted cruisers, encouraged picketing at the capitol by several car-sound enthusiasts who are no doubt well on their way to significant hearing loss, packed a House hearing room for one of the bill’s early public airings and purchased informational advertising on local Top 40 radio stations and in New Times.
In an early committee hearing, the master blasters were successful in getting an amendment tacked onto 2141 that limited the bill’s enforcement power to late-night and early morning hours–yet another sign that this law is intended primarily to clobber teen cruisers in Phoenix.
“We’re basically concerned about the wording of the bill,” says Carol Ledger, owner of the Tempe Audio Images store. “It’s basically an unenforceable law. It’s too subjective. If a policeman pulls up beside two cars, and there’s a teen in one, who’s gonna get the ticket?”
Laybe, who’s been working the bill hard among her colleagues, says she’s got forty votes in the House, more than enough to move it across the mall. When Ledger’s loose coalition of rolling rockers visited the legislature, the group became so intimidated by the process that it began looking for its own lobbyist. “Laybe knew what she was doing,” says Ledger. “We were amateurs.”
To Laybe’s credit, she’s also been working hard at finding goof-off alternatives for the cruising hordes. She’s been pushing for a youth center and the establishment of a more isolated cruising route. Her latest plan is to attract the kids and their gut-punching tape decks to the Grand Prix course through downtown. Laybe says the special-event exemption in her bill could be applied to a downtown cruise park, allowing the stereo wars to rage on.
Louis Rhodes, gatekeeper of civil liberties, isn’t impressed: “It’s a law that’s not needed. Its use will almost exclusively be aimed at young people. It’s one of those charges where it’s almost impossible for a person, once accused, to prove innocence.”
Alan Stephens, gatekeeper of loony legislation in the Arizona State Senate, isn’t impressed: “My mother used to yell at me when I turned up my stereo, too.”
John Nelson, local teenager, isn’t impressed: “Older people don’t like the way we listen to our music, and most of us don’t like the way they drive.”
Finally, there was the infamous rate-a-record law, Senate Bill 1481, now a part of history. Sponsor Jan Brewer, a Republican senator from Glendale, touted this bill as merely encouraging “informational” labels on nasty rock and rap records. Instead, the bill made it illegal to sell records to teenagers, the primary purchasers of the rude music.
“They executed Socrates 24 centuries ago for corrupting the morals of young people, for undermining the traditional value of Athens,” says Louis Rhodes. “This is the same thing.”
To restate the obvious, for all those who might have missed it: If record companies can’t sell certain records to teenagers, then they’ll stop making certain records. Bills similar to Brewer’s broadside still are floating around state legislatures all over the country. If only a few of them get passed, the screams of record-company execs will be heard here, even over the din of Central Avenue on a Friday night. The bill had cleared committee and was awaiting scheduling for a floor vote in the Senate last week when Brewer announced she was “holding” the bill. Apparently, record-company reps had been so “nice” about negotiating an industry-wide standard for record labeling, Brewer had become convinced that maybe all popular musicians weren’t tools of Satan. After all, hadn’t that nice Donny Osmond testified against the bill?
Everybody (bluenose lawmakers, record-industry lobbyists, longhair rock critics posing as Doug MacEachern) have had their say on this bill, except the group that would have been shut out of the record stores. Class?
“One of the main reasons for all this stuff is that this state is full of ill-informed old people who are afraid of any social changes,” says Patrick Kelly, Cortez High junior.
“With records, I think it’s mostly racism,” says Jason Miller, a classmate. “Back when rock ‘n’ roll began, parents didn’t like it because it was rock ‘n’ roll–they didn’t like it because it was Chuck Berry. I think the parents . . . don’t want white kids listening to rap artists.”
“I’m tired of people thinking I’m a computer, that whatever I hear I take in, and that’s what I’m gonna do,” says Shawna Dobbins, seventeen. “We’re not human until we’re eighteen? Who are they to say what we can do? They’re not our parents. There’s some old prune down there saying, ‘This is wrong.'”
