People of all ages should be considered inherently equal.

My opponent states that I'm "basically just being snarky with [my] definition of age." Putting aside the ad hominem fallacy in that response, I am defining age as "the amount of chronological time which has passed for an individual since birth". If my opponent would like to offer an alternate definition, I would be happy to entertain it, but I genuinely don't see how any other definition could be considered more mainstream than that one. The hypothetical of toddlers voting in a presidential election was one posited by my opponent, not myself. Certainly my proposed principle, like almost any other, can be taken to absurd extremes in which it's unlikely that an individual would pass the muster of all the other criteria that are involved in doing something. That doesn't make my principle inherently fallacious, any more than the principle that stealing is wrong can be declared fallacious by describing the circumstance of a man stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. Sure, not stealing might be more wrong in that circumstance, but it doesn't change the simple truth that stealing is wrong. I am not proposing a world where all eight month old babies can cast a vote. I am proposing a world where no one is denied the right to vote solely because they are eight months old. There is a world of difference between those two concepts, and I am not debating them "just for the sake of debating"; I am quite serious about it. This is not just an argument about extremes; this is an argument with many common, practical applications, because while people at the extremes (8 months old, or 100 years old) might be extremely unlikely to fall into needlessly oppressive categories, people on the borders are virtually certain to. There are twelve year olds old enough for a mature, romantic relationship with sexual content, and twenty year olds who most certainly are not. There are seventy-two year olds that can still work just fine, and sixty year olds with plenty of cause to force them to retire. There are thirty year olds perfectly suited to the job of President of the United States, and forty year olds (or perhaps certain seventy year olds) who are not. There are ten year olds who can drive, nineteen year olds who can drink, sixteen year olds who can make valid decisions about smoking, and fifteen year olds who would be more proficient than the most skilled employees at the NSA if hired as cyberdefense consultants. And for all of those, there are the correllary opposites of people who DO meet the age criteria for those activities, and have no business doing them. In many cases, we're not just talking about a small percentage, but actually a majority of people in that age group being oppressed just to protect a significant minority.Every single one of those people - on both sides of that age divide - are done a disservice by the current age-based criteria. It is too imperfect a tool for a modern society, capable of handling the nuance of individual circumstance. My opponent effectively conceded this point in terms of miniscule hypothetical extremes. Do they concede it on these border issues as well? If not, why not? And if so, do they also concede that the impact is significant enough to warrant real change to our approach? Why or why not?