According to Bo Thott of Cutler (“Unrealistic ruling,” BDN letter, Aug. 14), voting should be the privilege only of entirely uninfluenced and original thinkers. Those who are influenced to any degree by any other person or group and not completely original in their thoughts are merely proxies for those who influenced them and give those people extra votes. This would have the effect, if consistently put into practice, of reducing the voting population of the United States to only those 10 or 12 (if that many) original thinkers in this country. This would greatly simplify elections, but would also make it impossible for us to continue even the sham appearance of “democracy” here.

The prohibition against “mentally ill” persons voting in the Maine Constitution is no different than the Deep South’s prohibition of black persons’ voting in their elections: one group’s deciding that another group isn’t entitled to full citizenship. As Thomas Szasz states in “The Manufacture of Madness and The Myth of Mental Illness,” “mental illness” is merely the modern equivalent of “heresy.” According to Szasz the psychiatrist and institutionalization on psychiatric grounds are the equivalents of the Inquisitor and imprisonment for “heresy”: Different state of mind, as was different skin color or different beliefs once, is “wrong” and “inferior” and “not entitled to full human rights.”

Jesus was considered “mentally ill” by the Pharisees (“he hath a devil”). Thomas Edison was considered “not quite right in the head” by many people as a boy. How many geniuses down through history have had that label slapped on them, which shows how arbitrary and meaningless it is? Thott would have denied all of them the right to vote and their other rights as well. Why can’t people live and let live?

John D. Partin

Brewer