Mention the year 1968, and you’ll send a thrill through lots of folks now hitting the age of arthritis and the afternoon nap. Back then, the world seemed new—we bold youth set out to reinvent politics and social mores, and to overturn the ossified institutions of authority. Or so it seemed at the time.

Forty years on, some of the shine has worn off. True, the ‘60s produced some great tunes, but the celebration of “freedom” was often just code for running from responsibility towards a mirage of pseudo-pleasures. The result? The beginning of a decades-long surge in marital breakdown, rates of unwed children-bearing and drug abuse.

We Boomers still quiver at a Rolling Stones anthem and relish telling tall tales about the “streets of Chicago” during the notorious 1968 Democratic convention. But a mention of the real revolutionary stuff—efforts to “politicize the workers” or set up communes—prompts a quick change of topic. We all remember how working people scoffed at the young pups who tried to “raise their consciousness,” and we recall that communes quickly disintegrated over petty jealousies and personal hygiene issues.

But there’s one place where 1968 did usher in a revolution of a sort. Forty years ago this month, young people in France took to the streets and convinced millions of workers to launch strikes that shook the country to its core.

It started the old-fashioned way, as the New York Times reminds us. Students wanted more time together in their dorm rooms:

The events (or movement) of 40 years ago began in March at Nanterre University, just outside Paris, where a young French-born German named Daniel Cohn-Bendit led demonstrations against parietal rules — when young men and women could be together in dormitory rooms — that got out of hand.

When the university was closed in early May, the anger soon spread to central Paris, to the Latin Quarter and the Sorbonne, where the student elite demonstrated against antiquated university rules, and then outward, to workers in the big factories.

May 1968 produced events of the sort we still wax nostalgic about in the U.S.:

Scenes of the barricades, the police charges and the tear gas are dear to the French, recaptured in every magazine and scores of books, including one by photographer Marc Riboud, now 84, called ‘Under the Cobblestones,’ a reference to a famous slogan of the time from the leader-jester, Mr. Cohn-Bendit, now a member of the European Parliament: ‘Under the cobblestones, the beach.’ [The quote refers to paving stones that protestors tore up to hurl at police.]

Mr. Cohn-Bendit, known then as ‘Danny the Red’ for the color of both his politics and his hair, is also thought responsible for other famous slogans of the time: ‘It is forbidden to forbid’ and ‘Live without limits and enjoy without restraint!’ — with the word for enjoy, ‘jouir,’ having the double meaning of sexual climax.

Is “Danny the Red” embarrassed by this now? The Times does not say.

As in America, it all eventually fizzled. But it also left scars:

Raphaël Fonfroide, 22, an art-history student with a ponytail and a beard, said the real impact of 1968 was personal, not political. ‘All this for us is pretty abstract,’ he said. ‘We grew up in a world where most of our parents are divorced,’ and the children bore the brunt of the new liberalism.

The year 1968 ‘changed our parents, but the world was supposed to change, and it didn’t.’

Paradoxically, young people in France still march through the streets today, but their agenda is the opposite of that of May 1968. According to the Times:

Forty years ago, French students in neckties and bobby socks threw cobblestones at the police and demanded that the sclerotic postwar system must change. Today, French students, worried about finding jobs and losing state benefits, are marching through the streets demanding that nothing change at all.

Do today’s young Frenchmen admire the bold vision of their elders? Not according to Virginie Mullet, a 21-year-old history student. “All this is a little overdone,” she told the Times. “It’s all these old people celebrating themselves.”

I want to know more about this half-wit accountant, Allen Chanzis, who keeps getting blamed for Al Franken’s failures to pay every tax known to man. After all, Franken’s no two-bit bar comedian who can claim he’s never made a dime to offset his bar tab.

Even before his current attempt to get to Washington to enact tax laws that apply to the rest of us, Franken was in the Cadillac club of high-end comedians. One would assume he has a stable of accountants and lawyers housed in his servants’ quarters.

At least Keith Ellison could claim that his serial campaign finance violations involved obscure laws that bite you only when in elective office. But Franken’s failure to pay income taxes in 17 states, failure to pay workers compensation premiums, failure to pay disability premiums and failure to file corporate tax returns pretty much takes the wind out of the “gosh, I forgot” argument.

At least, that’s what I first thought. But then our chief law enforcer—Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman – announced that he has no problem with this kind of serial law-breaking. In a Saturday interview, Freeman morphed into a big softy:

‘It appears to me that this is some carelessness in his personal business,’ Freeman said of Franken. ‘Nothing criminal, nothing malicious, nothing nasty. I’m guessing most people have something [similar] in their life, where they forgot to pay their property taxes or workers’ comp.’

Fair enough, but I want the same consideration for Think Again miscreants when they skirt the edge of what is legal. When Downtown Dan “forgets” to put money in the parking meter, JonR “forgets” his driver’s license at home, Tiny Litess “forgets” the speed limit is 30 mph in town, and Average Guy “forgets” that he’s supposed to pay for the overpriced gas at the pump, I demand equal treatment from County Attorney Freeman.

And after Freeman clears these four upstanding gentlemen because they exhibited “carelessness in … personal business,” I expect that each will have a shot at a run for the Senate so that they can create laws for the rest of us shmucks. Yes, I know; they may also need qualifications for such high aspirations, such as a career as a high-end comedian.

Does Franken still have a pulse in his political life? I’ve stopped trying to guess. Stand-up comics enabled by half-wit accountants weave wonders in this world

Minnesota has one of the nation’s loosest voter-identification laws. You don’t need a photo ID to prove who you are, or that you are eligible to vote in the precinct where you are casting your ballot. You only need to find someone from that precinct who will vouch that you live there. That individual can also vouch for up to 14 other voters.

I served as a poll watcher in Minneapolis in the 2004 election, and was startled to discover how easy it would be to commit voter fraud here. You could be a non-citizen or live in another precinct, for example, and your fraud might well go undetected.

In 2007, Rep. Keith Ellison introduced a bill in Congress that would ban the use of photo ID’s as a requirement for voting in federal elections – thereby expanding Minnesota’s practice in this regard nation-wide.

Supporters of Minnesota’s lax law, including Ellison, claim that a photo ID requirement unduly burdens citizens who are poor, or don’t possess a driver’s license.

But yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court soundly rejected that notion in upholding Indiana’s voter-identification law, which requires photo identification.

According to the New York Times,

In a 6-to-3 ruling in one of the most awaited election-law cases in years, the court rejected arguments that Indiana’s law imposes unjustified burdens on people who are old, poor or members of minority groups and less likely to have driver’s licenses or other acceptable forms of identification. Because Indiana’s law is considered the strictest in the country, similar laws in the other 20 or so states that have photo-identification rules would appear to have a good chance of surviving scrutiny.

The court found that the state has a “valid interest” in improving the election process and discouraging fraud. The decision came just eight days before Indiana’s primary, which may decide whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate.

The Times noted that

Justice John Paul Stevens, who announced the judgment of the court and wrote an opinion in which Chief [Justice] John G. Roberts, Jr. and Anthony M. Kennedy joined, alluded to – and brushed aside – complaints that the law benefits Republicans and works against Democrats, whose ranks are more likely to include poor people or those in minority groups.

The justifications for the law ‘should not be disregarded simply because partisan interests may have provided one motivation for the votes of individual legislators,’ Justice Stevens wrote.

Justices Antonin Scala, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito concurred. “The law should be upheld because its overall burden is minimal and justified,” said their opinion.

Indiana permits voters without a photo ID to cast a provisional ballot. Their vote is counted if they show up at their county courthouse within 10 days and produce identification.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, John Fund points out the importance of the court’s ruling:

In ruling on the constitutionality of Indiana’s voter ID law — the toughest in the nation — the Supreme Court had to deal with the claim that such laws demanded the strictest of scrutiny by courts, because they could disenfranchise voters.

All nine Justices rejected that argument.

Fund supplies context for the decision, describing Justice Stevens’ personal encounters with voter fraud as an attorney in Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago in the 1950’s and ’60’s. The Daley machine governed Chicago, says Fund, “with a mix of of patronage, contract favoritism and, where necessary, voter fraud.” He continues:

That fraud became nationally famous in 1960, when the late Mayor Richard J. Daley’s extraordinary efforts swung Illinois into John F. Kennedy’s column. In 1982, inspectors estimated as many as one in 10 ballots cast in Chicago during that year’s race for governor to be fraudulent for various reasons, including votes by the dead.

Mr. Stevens witnessed all of this as a lawyer, special counsel to a commission rooting out corruption in state government, and as a judge. On the Supreme Court, this experience has made him very mindful of these abuses.

Barack Obama, also from Illinois, “has approached Chicago politics very differently,” says Fund. “He came to the city as a community organizer in the 1980’s and quickly developed a name for himself as a litigator in voting cases.” Fund details Obama’s work on behalf of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which registers voters:

In 1995, then GOP Gov. Jim Edgar refused to implement the federal ‘Motor Voter’ law. Allowing voters to register using only a postcard and blocking the state from culling voter rolls, he argued, could invite fraud.

Mr. Obama sued on behalf of [ACORN] and won. ACORN later invited Mr. Obama to help train its staff….

Fund describes ACORN’s voter registration work as “scandal-prone.” In St. Louis, Mo., he says, “officials found that in 2006 over 1,000 addresses listed on its registrations didn’t exist.” The feds have indicted eight of ACORN’s local workers and one has pleaded guilty, according to Fund. In Seattle, he adds, officials invalidated 1,762 ACORN registrations and seven of its workers were charged with felonies.

In six months, Americans will go to the polls to elect a new president and Congress, as well as a host of state and local officials. It’s vital that the validity of the results be beyond question — and election laws requiring photo ID have a central role to play here.

Yearning for Zion is a renegade sect of Mormon polygamists whose members reside on a ranch in El Dorado, Texas. The group is not of the modern world. The women’s dress and hairstyles recall faded photos of our great grandmothers. Members’ talk of prophets and polygamy is jarring — even to an American public that’s seen and heard almost everything.

But the sect has just had a head-on crash with modernity. Earlier this month, Texas officials swooped in and removed 437 of its children from their parents.

Why? Time magazine gives the essentials: An “anonymous call from inside the ranch alleged that the kids were in danger of physical and emotional abuse…” Authorities believed they needed to take the kids “given the ranch culture of young girls, older men and arranged marriages.” Since the raid, “the complicated criminal investigation continues, and the only public details of the alleged child abuse involve several teenage mothers found at the ranch who were described in a request for a second search warrant.”

This raid ends a decades-long standoff between the government and polygamists, according to Time. Polygamy has long been illegal, but convictions have been few. In addition, polygamists tend to wall themselves off in remote areas. As a result, law enforcement has generally avoided confronting these groups.

But Texas is no longer avoiding confrontation. And Americans must face some of the troubling issues brought to light by this raid.

First, marriages involving girls in their early teens—and social pressures that encourage under-age marriage—is child abuse, plain and simple. There should be no liberal or conservative divide on this point.

But let’s think about polygamous living arrangements as a basis for this raid. Today, traditional notions of marriage are under attack. We hear everywhere that anyone who is “committed” to another should not be denied the “right” to marry. Our constitutional jurisprudence is warming to the idea that many aspects of behavior involve a “right to privacy,” and that marriage is within that zone.

As a result, what moral, social or legal response can we give today to members of Yearning for Zion who demand that polygamy be decriminalized?

This question is relevant not only to obscure Mormon sects. In Canada and Europe, some Muslims are already demanding state recognition of plural marriage. To the right of privacy and equal protection under the law, they add religious freedom as a justification.

Another point: The Texas raid wrenched hundreds of children away from their mothers. According to Time, 77 of these youngsters are under the age of two. The children are now living in a variety of temporary facilities and foster homes, and are being supervised by a foster care system that is already overtaxed. Was grave harm done to these children and their mothers when Texas authorities seized and refused to return them? The answer seems clear, and should make us shudder.

Think of it this way. We wouldn’t dream of removing children from families because they have no father, despite the fact that studies show a clear connection between fatherlessness and a host of social ills. What evidence is there of harm to the children of Yearning for Zion?

Finally, what does this raid say about the limits of government’s reach in a democracy? Should it disturb us that over 400 children were taken by the government based on an anonymous tip? What of proportionality? Assuming that government intervention was justified, what is the authority for a wholesale roundup of hundreds?

We may have patience when the government is attacking a “sect” of odd-looking people with strange habits and practices. But it’s in just such cases that the Constitution can easily grow meaningless.