ALL the States Should Do This

Good for Pennsylvania to finally rid itself of the horrible idea of marriage under the age of 18.

I would go a lot further.  I would raise the minimum age to 25, knowing what we know now about brain development.

Not that it takes any brains to go out and get married, but that is another issue altogether.

Details:

When legislation was introduced in 2017 in California to ban anyone under the age of 18 from getting married, opposition to the bill came from the Northern California chapter of the ACLU. Among the defenses given by the ACLU was that marrying young allowed individuals to escape the foster care system by becoming emancipated through marriage.

Leave it to the stupid fuckers in the ACLU to once again shit all over the rights of women and girls. Hey, it's perfectly okay for girls--and it is almost always girls--to ruin their lives through early marriages.

From last year is this article mentioning the ACLU:

California has since amended its laws. In 2017, state Senator Jerry Hill, a Democrat, introduced legislation to ban marriage under 18 without exception.

But he was met by opposition, surprisingly, from groups traditionally associated with the left. The ACLU Northern California chapters, along with the Children's Law Center of California, opposed the bill, claiming estimates of the scale of the problem were overblown. They cited Los Angeles County, where just 44 petitions for marriage by a minor we made in 2017 out of a population of 10 million. The groups argued that the new law would strip youth of their right to form their families and eliminate one of the only pathways to exit the foster care system through emancipation.

Never mind brain development and ruined economic prospects. There is no "right" for "youth" to form their families when such stupidity almost always turns into a disaster. This isn't the 1950s anymore, when such early marriages were too common.

link

Child Marriages

I missed this NYT piece from a couple of months ago about the persistent problem of child brides in the United States.

Most of it is happening with certain cultures from other parts of the world where this is common.

In the old, old days, such marriages in this country were not unheard of, as long as the bride was at least the age of puberty.

My mother was one such example, but she lied on her marriage license she was 18. I don't think my dad knew she was only 14 until later. They were encouraged to get married by an in-law of the family. My mom's mom was horrified over the marriage, but she liked my dad, who was 23, and that, as they say, is that. There was no pregnancy involved.

They were married some 65 years, not exactly happily but they stayed together, until my dad died in 1997 at the age of 89. My mom died nearly three years later, in December of 1999.

Nowadays, this thing would not be tolerated. Somebody like my dad would be going to prison. There is not the stigma attached anymore to having a child out of wedlock. People no longer feel pressured to get married at such a young age to "give the baby a name" when there was a pregnancy involved. Young marriages (younger than 23) largely went out of style by the time I became an adult in the early 1970s--by the time I was 18 in 1973, that was about the end of it. A few of my classmates did marry young, with some of them still married, but most of these marriages didn't make it.

However, this country does have people from other countries where child marriages are allowed, and this presents problems.