RE: Child marriage in the US
I love a good healthy debate so no lions den. š
My job is hard because Iām trying to help rewrite the laws to protect people from polygamous groups where underage insestuous marriage is the norm.
I donāt see no exceptions being passed for generations down the road.
Itās been a constant struggle in trying to help rewrite the laws. Trying to figure out how to protect the minority without affecting the majority. We havenāt figured out how to do it yet.
Getting married young myself, Iām not against making the legal age 18. Youāre still a baby at 18. You still have so much to learn about yourself and the world. Both your partner and you change so much from this age on.
In a perfect world I would agree with you and say itās best to let the public decide and not the legislature but I donāt think weāre there. If you could wipe out ignorance then sure let the general population vote on it. Until then I think someone needs to step in and help protect the young kids that may not want to get married but have parents that want them to.
Another challenge Iām facing here in Utah is āspiritual unionsā in these groups. Theyāre not legally married but maybe things would be able to be enforced better if the legal age were higher.
Too, whatās waiting until youāre 18 anyway. You have your whole lives together. 18 is nothing.
I get that there may be extenuating circumstances but maybe it is best to still wait. What if you decide you want something different in the couple years you wait.
Marriage isnāt always easy. Especially when youāre still a baby.
But you see, Jewels3? Iām completely cool with what youāre doing as for your fight against incestuous underage polygamous marriage. Such a situation for a young girl wreaks with danger in every sense of it. If these marriages arenāt even legal, I would think that these menās actions would violate the gross cohabitation laws in your state. And, yeah, I admit that Iām a square who would tell any youngster to put off marriage and starting a family until their thirties. However, here is the problem that I am having with the marriage bill that is pending a decision in Florida. You make an interesting point about wiping out ignorance and subsequently letting the public decide on what the fate of underage marriage should be here in our nation. I am all for educating the public on this topic in that respect, because I am someone who doesnāt like it whenever I go to an election poll and find a question on my ballot that makes no sense to me at all. However, I believe that the public should not just get one side of the issue from the press and the media. The public should be educated on both the pros and the cons of this topic and be able to see the whole broad picture instead. What greatly disturbs me about this movement to end underage marriage in Florida and in other states is that people like Fraidy Reiss of Unchained At Last and Jeanne Smoot of the Tahirih Justice Center are getting all the press and media coverage out there on this topic in their quest to end underage marriage, whereas very few, if any, of these same news and press agencies are giving Stephanie Nilva and others in agreement with her any kind of coverage on this topic. If you donāt know who Stephanie Nilva is, she is a feminist who is sharply opposed to revamping state laws to make the marriageable age in our nation a solid 18 years old with no exceptions. Like the majority of us, she is against 6- or 7-year-old girls being forced into unwanted marriages with elderly men or at all. At the same time, she believes that the laws in our country should allow for teenage minors to get married under certain justifiable circumstances and that there should also be safeguards in place in these laws.
Somehow I donāt think that the people of Florida are going to adjust very gracefully to a solid marriageable age of 18 years old with no exceptions if the marriage bill there should be ratified. Iām not saying that the marriage bill there wonāt be passed and be signed into law by their governor. The people pushing it will likely continue to pressure the state legislators and the governor in that state to make it a reality. However, the magnitude of repercussions that will surface from this new law will far outweigh any benefits that it may bring to the people of that state. Sure, there will be no more shotgun weddings involving Loretta-Lynn-style couples in that state. However, there will be more people on the sex offender registry, in prison and on welfare than before, and not necessarily those who belong in any of those same predicaments or even as so much deserve to be so. Even child advocate John Walsh, who is the co-founder of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, has warned the public against the reactionary right swing of the pendulum in some of his television interviews; and he is a Floridian himself. When I was living in California so many years ago, I vaguely recall some kind of law that was passed that made it extremely difficult for minors to marry in that state. However, because of the unpopularity of the law, it was eventually repealed and the original law regarding underage marriage was restored. I get the intuition that the same would likely happen in Florida, if the marriage bill pending a decision there does get passed.
Very soon Iām going to be writing and posting an article here on Steemit about the marriage bill in Florida and why I believe that it should not be passed. Iām thinking that it will likely take a while before that bill gets to Florida Governor Rick Scottās desk because of his involvement in helping the survivors of the most recent hurricane that hit there. There are still people there without homes. Anyhow, even though I know that you will probably not agree with what I write in that article, you are perfectly welcome to read it once I have published it; and you can even comment on it if you wish to do so.
Let me ask you this. Wouldnāt it be better to change those laws or add exceptions into them? Kids donāt need to become adults before they need to. Granted, some will and some are forced into it.
Sorry for the delay in responding. Iām in the middle of a move.
Iāll check your article out. Iām assuming youāve posted it.
Now that you mention it, Jewels3, thatās actually what Argentina and the Netherlands did. Argentina is a nation that favors establishing a solid minimum marriageable age of 18 years old with no exceptions all over the world. However, they have placed safeguards in their juvenile-justice-related laws to protect their nation from encountering the same problems that the United States of America does in the way I described in my previous reply. The Netherlands had an age of consent of 21 years old up until the year 1990. At the same time, if I am not mistaken, the only way that a minor under 21 years of age could get married in that nation was to get permission from the Dutch monarchy, which seldom ever happened. Kind of like you or me trying to get an appointment to have tea with Queen Elizabeth at the Buckingham Palace. Not so easy to do, to say the least. By the 1980s, as a result of these laws in the Netherlands, their society had become anarchical in that there was such a severe disconnect between them and the criminal justice system that the criminal laws they did have on their books regarding juvenile-justice-related issues pertaining to sexual conduct were nearly unenforceable. Then they reformed many of these laws by giving adolescents more say in how they got enforced in their nation, but 21 years old continued to be the minimum marriageable age in that country. That is, unless it has changed recently. What Iām thinking is that probably the same thing is going to happen in Florida eventually, if their state does decide to pass this child marriage bill and establishes 18 years old as the minimum marriageable age with no exceptions. However, I donāt think that it will happen overnight, because many people in the criminal justice system and the likes want to have their cake and eat it too and I don't see Texas or Virginia doing anything along those lines despite that they have toughened their laws against underage marriage recently. Law-enforcement officials and prosecutors talk about wanting to protect adolescents from becoming victims of corruption and exploitation. However, when I continue to hear about high school girls being charged with contempt of court and being arrested and sent to Juvenile Hall for refusing to testify against their older boyfriends in carnal knowledge cases that they view to be witch hunts, I find myself feeling very skeptical about anything that these law-enforcement officials and prosecutors say. If they view these young girls as victims, I donāt see how it makes any sense that they treat them like criminals in those situations. It seems as though these law-enforcement officials and prosecutors make these carnal knowledge cases involving teenage minors out to be more about themselves than about anyone else. I honestly donāt believe that they truly care about these teenage girls, their families or anyone else involved in those kinds of cases. Iāve come across some extremely relentless individuals in our legal system through the years that I begin to question whether some of these people even have a soul inside of them. Not to say that there are a few good apples here and there in our legal system. Theyāre just getting more and more difficult to find. I have not posted my article about the marriage bill in Florida yet. Iāll probably be doing so near the end of this month or the beginning of next month. If you want, Iāll let you know when I publish it. Thank you for replying back to me. :)
I donāt see any way to make everyone happy and protect everyone. Thatās why this is such a complex issue. There will be strong opinions on both sides.
My prediction is there will be small changes over decades until people get use to an older marriage age. But then youāll still see changes along the way.
About your comment about officials not caring. I once thought that. I worked with the Attorney Generals chief investigator quite a bit last year and got to see that more do care than we realize. That was important for me to be able to see.
Oh, I've known some really decent officials in my lifetime. In fact, I make it a point to vote for those same officials whom I know are going to do a good job, whenever they run for office and I know how they're going to handle issues that the public presents to them once elected. However, as each year goes by, I come across more and more stories about elected officials being involved in hypocrisy and corruption than before. Iām not particularly a fan of Florida House Representative Daisy Baezās quest to pass her marriage bill in Florida. However, I have seen her speak in YouTube videos, and one thing that I do agree with her on is that people need to get out and vote more often than they do. Otherwise, we are allowing others to decide for us who gets into office. People think that the only important election is the presidential election every four years. However, it is local and state officials who have the power to decide what quality of life we are going to have in our respective state jurisdictions and what laws will affect our lives.
I have watched many YouTube videos and have read many articles regarding the movement to ban all underage marriage in America. What I find so interesting about them is that these activists behind this same movement talk about the cracks that exist in the American legal system as what they believe to be a result of allowing minors to marry before 18 years of age. For example, they talk about how a minor cannot get a divorce to be free from an unwanted marriage unless their spouse signs the paperwork for them provided that their spouse is over 18 years of age. I completely get how wrong that is. At the same time, I find it so bizarre, because I remember watching Judge Wapner on āThe Peopleās Courtā so many years ago and hearing him tell the court that a minor can legally break out of a binding contract easily with no questions asked. It would seem that there would be a way to get the marriage laws pertaining to minors to mirror the laws regarding contracts in that same respect. In other words, if a 17-year-old can break out of a binding contract really easily because he or she is not above the age of majority, it would only seem fair that a 17-year-old should also be able to break out of an unwanted marriage really easily inasmuch as a marriage is no different than a binding contract in essence. Opponents of āchild marriageā bans across the nation talk about legislation in that respect to nip such problems in the bud rather than making it illegal for teenage minors to get married altogether. I know that that is only one of many issues that these activists in the movement against underage marriage have brought up in their presentations to the public. However, like Stephanie Nilva, I come from the school of thought that if someoneās liver has two or three cancerous tumors on it, it is better to remove the tumors themselves than to remove the entire liver. Removing the tumors addresses the cancer directly, whereas removing the entire liver opens a person up to a whole new myriad of health problems. The same logic would seem to apply to underage marriage. If our nation establishes a solid marriageable age of 18 years old with absolutely no exceptions for minors to wed under any circumstances, our state legislatures across the nation may be erasing most, if not all, of these problems that people like Fraidy Reiss and Jeanne Smoot speak of. However, they could also be opening up a can of worms that will bring even much bigger problems to our nation that may cause irreparable harm to everyone. What bewilders me is that none of the proponents of these marriage bills to outlaw underage matrimony throughout our country have researched into the possible repercussions that these laws could have once they are put into effect. Just because something may look good on its surface to many people in the short run doesnāt mean that it is going to be good for the public interest in the long run.