Same reason the House is out of session to avoid releasing the Epstein files?
The vision of a child bride is a deeply foreign concept to most Americans. Underage marriage is regarded by most as an abroad problem, or the type of detestable horror committed by isolated malcontent cult leaders, later to be turned into a true crime documentary one laments over with their friends.
But child marriage remains legal in the majority of U.S. states, and getting rid of it has proved supremely difficult.
Thirty-four U.S. states still permit a child under the age of 18 to marry — usually with the consent of their parents or a judge. Four states — California, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Oklahoma — establish no minimum age for a minor to enter into a binding legal and social contract. According to a new report from Unchained at Last, a nonprofit advocating for the end of underage marriage exceptions in the United States, and Equality Now, a gender equality nonprofit, over 314,000 marriages involving minors — most between the ages of 16 and 17 — were registered over the course of the last two decades.
Over 80 percent of those marriages involved a girl who was underage (some as young as 10), and most of those marriages were to adult men. The organization’s report found that in that same time frame, over 60,000 of those marriages involved a child that was not legally old enough to consent to sex with their spouse.
If you aren’t irate yet, here are two explanations for opposition:
In New Hampshire, where an underage marriage ban was enacted in 2024, one Republican state representative argued that underage marriage was a “legitimizing option” for girls of “ripe, fertile age” who became pregnant before adulthood. In Missouri, a Republican-authored ban was opposed by members of the same party, with one member of the GOP arguing that eliminating child marriage would increase incentives for the pregnant child to seek an abortion.
Let’s go back to “some as young as 10.” There’s no fucking defense for that. The argument is literally, “If you get a preteen pregnant, you should be able to marry her so she doesn’t seek out an abortion.”
I’m not a total prude here … I get that there are edge cases like one high-schooler having just turned 18 while his girlfriend is still a sophomore, which to my mind is a morally grey area, but if that’s about a pregnancy, that’s a separate issue from marriage itself.
This said, knocking up someone one-third your age and needing the law to swoop to your rescue shows some extremely twisted thinking that probably mean being part of the general public is risky. It shouldn’t be rewarded with a literal get-out-of-jail-free card.
This WAS becoming a mainstream issue more people were waking up to. Then ten years of rule by the culprits out large shut the whole thing up and went further to normalize it. Now were just waiting for talking heads to start edging close to saying its not taboo. Dumpster fire of a social fabric speckled by predators hiding in plain sight and laughing at us.
The Republicans need pedophile votes, so they legally protect pedophilic behavior.
I don’t see any reason to allow child marriages. The pregnancy argument doesn’t explain why legal marriages are needed, and there’s nothing stopping these nutters (pun intended) from going through some religious marriage ceremony if that does happen somehow.
Legal marriages are useful for completely separate reasons, like taxes and health insurance benefits. There’s not really any reason for a child to need any of that.
Also, just saying, but there should be no circumstance where it’s acceptable for someone significantly older than a child to have any kind of romantic relationship with them. The high school argument is another thing since they likely were in the same classes at school anyway, but that can only be taken so far.
I mean, there’s no need to get married, let alone in high school, like … give it a bit of time. That said, I don’t think there’s anything magical that happens at 18 versus the day before. It’s an arbitrary cutoff we’ve chosen as a society. And that line does need to be drawn somewhere, but what is adolescence if not making really stupid decisions with your peer group?
That said, I don’t think there’s anything magical that happens at 18 versus the day before.
This I agree with, though the core of the issue is government-recognized marriages which offer many benefits that don’t help someone that young since they’re usually still a dependent anyway. For relationships as a whole, it gets a lot more complex, but I think it’s fairly noncontroversial to say that a significant age gap between a child and an adult partner is problematic.
For non-dependent children, I think it gets more complex regarding marriage benefits, but I don’t think marriage makes a whole lot of sense there either. There could just be tax breaks and government-provided healthcare for them. The tax breaks don’t even seem that unlikely, given enough support, but we know how healthcare is these days sadly.
Either way, people can hold their own ceremonies separate from legal marriage if they want since legal marriage is just getting a paper signed in front of the right person basically. Nothing’s really stopping me from putting some chairs out, ordering a fancy wedding cake, and holding a party with someone random (let alone my partner), aside from cost anyway.
My ex-wife got legally emancipated at 16 and moved in with her 18-year-old boyfriend. They didn’t get married, but they cohabitated as such for a year or two (not a precise figure I committed to memory) while her parents (who she had reasons to want to leave) kept trying to get involved in her situation both personally and legally all the way to her 18th birthday.
Marriage could have conferred insurance benefits in the case of disaster, which at that age, one needs some level of safety net, as she did finish high school and as such didn’t have much time to work.
This is why I don’t see this as so cut and dry. When life throws a ton of shitty options at you, at least the more options, the better. Obviously, we need statutory rape laws and the long tail of related child sexual abuse covered, but I’m not seeing marriage as the boogeyman here, so much as marrying for the adult to avoid charges, which should absolutely be struck down.
It seems we’ve as a society settled on an age gap of no more than two years until both reach the age of majority. Sophomore Dates Senior hasn’t exactly raised eyebrows (though admittedly individual parents have certainly not been pleased) since before I was in high school. Hell, many of the girls at my high school were on the prowl for college guys so they could get booze and drugs (and this was a very affluent campus; just people looking to rebel).
Doesn’t help both sides treat it as an all-or-nothing affair, and that “with parental consent” bit does a lot of heavy lifting, by which I mean, to make the status-quo extra stupid.
Slap the same age-parity restrictions on it as age-of-consent laws, toss that parents-consenting-on-behalf-of-their-spawn crap in the garbage bin, and … well, the stupid articles will at least have different questions to ask?
Personally, I’m pro-emancipation, and see this as an important part of that conversation, but both sides of the aisle would rather infantilize young (white)adults until the age of 26(or older …), so what do I know?
