Several years ago, conservatives were fawning over 13 year-old Jonathan Krohn, who gave a rousing speech at CPAC while promoting his book. A couple of weeks ago, Bill Maher, in the rant at the end of his show, explained that if middle school boys can explain your ideology, it’s because your ideology is on the level of a middle school aged boy. Krohn is seventeen now, and has matured beyond his CPAC days:
“I think it was naive,” Krohn now says of the speech. “It’s a 13-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time.… I live in Georgia. We’re inundated with conservative talk in Georgia.… The speech was something that a 13-year-old does. You haven’t formed all your opinions. You’re really defeating yourself if you think you have all of your ideas in your head when you were 12 or 13. It’s impossible. You haven’t done enough.”
Krohn won’t go so far as to say he’s liberal, in part because his move away from conservatism was a move away from ideological boxes in general.
“I want to be Jonathan Krohn,” he said, “and I’m tired of being an ideology, and it’s not fun and it gets boring and it’s not who we are as individuals.”
Guess what he support? Marriage equality. Also: the Affordable Care Act. What a difference a few years of growing up makes. It’s a shame so few of the CPAC participants have undergone such growth.
[h/t Towleroad]
