Idaho Wisely Rejects Underage Marriage Bill
I realize that it has been a while since I’ve written about this topic here on Steemit. Many events have taken place since then regarding how state legislatures across the United States of America have responded to the collective efforts of Unchained At Last and the Tahirih Justice Center to abolish underage marriage here in our nation. The Kansas City Star has written numerous articles about this topic, and they have slanted their articles to misrepresent this crusade to be a well-meaning one that would protect all the children of the world. Therefore, I only feel that it is in the best interest of the American people that I write articles to warn people about the problems that this same crusade is going to cause everyone if Unchained At Last and the Tahirih Justice Center ultimately get their own way with these laws.
Not too long ago my mother told me an interesting story that back when she was 12 years old and in the seventh grade, she knew a 14-year-old girl in her class who was married to an 18-year-old man. The girl had become pregnant halfway into the semester. However, my mother had not told my maternal grandmother about that incident back then, because she was worried that she would become upset about it. Anyhow, my mother told me that, to the best of her knowledge, this young girl never suffered any kind of abuse or mistreatment from her 18-year-old husband and that this girl wanted to be married to him. Of course, unfortunately, there are people in our society today who are skeptical to believe that a girl as young as 14 years old can be happily married to a man over the age of 18 and live happily ever after with him. Social pressures against these marriages have become extreme and unfairly oppressive in today’s American culture.
A couple of years ago, I had read a true story on the Internet about a man who was 18 years old when he had gotten his girlfriend pregnant, who at the time was 14 years old. He did the honorable thing and married the young girl. It was clear to anyone reading that story that charging him with a crime, sending him to prison, and making him live the rest of his life on the sex offender registry would not have benefited anyone except for the self-serving individuals in our criminal justice system who thrive off of these situations for their own personal gain. The 14-year-old girl wanted to marry him, and she was happy that he wanted to marry her. So many adolescent boys younger than 18 years of age get middle-school and high-school girls pregnant nowadays and then bail on them and conveniently turn back up in their baby mamas’ lives only to cause them trouble. However, this 18-year-old man wanted to marry the mother of his child and support her, and he did so. Everything was destined to work out, but their troubles were far from over. This 18-year-old boy’s best friend insisted that he was a child molester. In fact, after so many years that this young man had been married to this girl and had proven that he was worthy to be her husband and the father of her children, his best friend continued to brand him a child molester merely because of the four-year age difference between the husband and the wife and the wife’s tender age at the outset of the couple’s relationship. My response to that scenario is that with friends like that one best friend of his, who needs enemies? More like his best friend was never a friend to him at all. Now, I can understand that part of being a good friend can involve one being brutally honest with someone and getting them to do the right thing. However, no true best friend ever continues calling someone a child molester for years on out long after it is more than obvious that that someone is not anything of the such. Social workers harassed this couple early on in their marriage and arbitrarily labeled their marriage as “high risk.” However, this couple made the wise decision to move away from the undesirable situation that these public sector officials were causing them, and they relocated to somewhere where they would be out of these same people’s reach.
1. Idaho Made The Right Choice To Reject A Detrimental Marriage Bill
Idaho has the reputation of being an agricultural state where most of our nation’s potatoes are grown. Some people may believe that Idaho is a backwards state. However, I beg to differ. Back when I was living on the West Coast so many years ago, sometimes I would stay up late at night listening to the AM radio stations on my radio. One radio station that I really liked listening to was KBOI from Boise, Idaho, because the radio announcers there seemed to know more about what was going on in Hollywood and in the entertainment industry than even some of the most inquisitive journalists in the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area where I lived at the time. I remember so many years ago when a friend of mine had told me that the minimum driving age in Idaho was 14 years old. I don’t know if the driving age there is still the same today. Anyhow, I was quite astonished to hear that it was that low back then.
Recently I was going through some articles on the Internet about marriage bills that have been introduced to different state legislatures throughout our nation. One article that caught my eye was in Newsweek, and it was titled “REPUBLICAN CONTROLLED IDAHO CONGRESS REJECTS BILL TO END CHILD MARRIAGE FOR THOSE UNDER THE AGE OF 16” by Daniel Moritz-Rabson. According to this same article, the Idaho state legislature had rejected a bill from Democratic Representative Melissa Wintrow that, among other things, would have prohibited marriage before the age of 16 under any circumstances if it had been ratified. However, even though the article was informative, the problem that I had with it was that it presented this news with a sense of doom and gloom; whereas, in my humble opinion, this outcome was the best thing that could have ever happened to Idaho in its state history.
Ms. Wintrow is another one of those societal fundamentalists who believe that abolishing teenage marriage is somehow going to turn her state into an “age-appropriate” Utopia where everyone will live their lives by a Puritanical code of conduct that suits her agenda. The present marriage law in Idaho allows for 16- and 17-year-old minors to get married with parental consent. If someone 15 years of age or younger wishes to get married in that state, they must get judicial approval on top of parental consent to do so. I have no problem with that law, but Ms. Wintrow and all the other societal fundamentalists, femi-Nazi extremists, and self-appointed pedo-experts believe that that same law opens the door to all sorts of horrendous things upon adolescents; and Ms. Wintrow had proposed a bill to her state legislature that would require 16- and 17-year-old minors to obtain judicial approval on top of parental consent to get married in her state. This same marriage bill also aimed to outlaw anyone from getting married before the age of 16 under any circumstances. However, the Idaho state legislature rejected this marriage bill in a 39-28 vote in March of 2019. Nonetheless, despite what Ms. Wintrow and her legion of circus clowns may believe, Idaho is now fortunately going to be one of the states here in our nation that will not have a marriage law that will send more young men needlessly to prison, overwhelm the sex offender registry with people who don’t belong on it, and cause more teenage mothers to go on welfare and raise their children with the stigma that their father is a convicted sex offender in the eyes of both society and the law. Overall, such a marriage bill would definitely have caused the taxes to go up significantly in Idaho because of all the people either going on welfare or going to jail or prison as a result of it, and there would also have been a dramatic increase in poverty in that state. New Jersey and Delaware are the only two states here in the Union that have completely banned all marriage before the age of eighteen, and already these two states are getting pushback from their residents because of it. Chris Christie attempted to protect New Jersey from this dreadful fate during his tenure as the governor of that state, but, unfortunately, his successor was not as good of a leader as he was.
As I could never have expected the mainstream press and the media to be completely candid about this topic, I was not the least surprised that this same article was replete with questionable statistics and misleading information from Unchained At Last regarding underage marriage. Idaho Republican Representative Bryan Zollinger voted against this marriage bill inasmuch as he adheres to his party’s belief that allowing for government to meddle into people’s private lives causes more problems than it remedies. I agree. Idaho Republican Representative Christy Zito warned her state legislature about how such a marriage bill could cause an increase in wrongful abortions. I’m not thrilled about anyone getting an abortion, even though I am well aware that there are people who sharply disagree with me on the issue of abortion and believe that it should be an inalienable right for every girl and woman. However, Ms. Zito’s opinion does hold a great amount of wisdom to it, because pregnant teenage girls whose baby daddies go to prison could find themselves in a panicky situation of feeling pressured to terminate their pregnancy because of a future of economic uncertainty with which they would be confronted in that event. I am of the school of thought that most teenage girls who love their unborn babies would go to whatever length to protect them and keep them regardless of the circumstances, but it makes no sense to put these young girls into extremely desperate situations with these harsh marriage laws being proposed. Ms. Wintrow complained that the opponents of her marriage bill found it “too progressive” to vote in favor of it. My response to her is that I don’t know what other results she could have expected from her opponents, because she never offered anything in return for voting in favor of this marriage bill. For example, she could have very well sought to expand the death penalty in her state so that prison rapists could then be executed for their heinous crimes, but she was too involved with herself to do so. What is so noteworthy about Ms. Zito’s decision to vote against Ms. Wintrow’s marriage bill is that despite that Ms. Zito is a woman, she was brave and strong enough not to allow any femi-Nazi extremists to pressure her or intimidate her into going along with Ms. Wintrow’s agenda. Ms. Zito based her decision on facts rather than on questionable ideologies. Moreover, I find nothing progressive about Ms. Wintrow’s marriage bill for reasons described herein.
The name of another extremist organization that has joined this destructive crusade to do away with teenage marriage here in our country is Girls Not Brides. Now, I will not criticize this organization for protecting little girls as young as 6 years old from being forced into unwanted marriages with men in their eighties and nineties in Islamic nations that practice Sharia law. However, I sincerely believe that these so-called activists are way out of line whenever they bring their subversive activities here to the land of milk and honey and expect everyone to cater to their demands. Alongside other societal fundamentalists, they clutter the Internet with gruesome pictures and images of 8-, 9-, and 10-year-old girls with acid-scarred faces lying in hospital beds after a honeymoon with their violently abusive 70-something-year-old husbands in Islamic nations that are best described as oppressive patriarchies, when the majority of underage marriages in our nation don’t involve anyone younger than perhaps 13 or 14 years old and many of these American adolescent brides go on to live long, happy, and productive lives at their husbands’ sides regardless of how much older their husbands are than them. In a culture of hypergamy that our nation is, how can we not expect that there will be adolescent girls who want to join their lives with someone who may be outside their age circles, in a legal and sound way?
I’m not mindless of the fact that teenage girls who marry older men can and do face social pressures from self-righteous do-gooders who continue on with their pipedream of changing our nation into some kind of “age-appropriate” Utopia. In my article titled “California Proceeds With Caution Regarding Underage Marriage Bill,” I pointed out how Billy Bush threw hateful, ugly remarks at Doug Hutchison in the form of words like “pedophile” and “pervert” when Mr. Hutchison (then 53 years old) appeared on Access Hollywood Live with Courtney Stodden, whom he had married two years earlier when she was 16 years old. Ann Margaret was a close friend of Elvis Presley from the time she had starred in movies with the King of Rock-And-Roll up to the time that he had died in 1977. She defends him to this very day. She knew that he was 24 years old and that Priscilla Presley was only 14 years old when he had first fallen in love with Priscilla Presley, and she is not someone who would have stood by and allowed anyone to accuse him of being a pedophile or a pervert. In fact, if Billy Bush had had the occasion to interview Ann Margaret when he was still hosting Access Hollywood Live and he had accused Elvis Presley of being a pedophile and a pervert, Ann Margaret probably would have slapped him across the face so hard that a pop from her hand hitting his face would have been heard all throughout the television studio. In that event, Billy Bush’s face would have turned black and blue, and everyone in the entire world, including the other Bushes, would have been laughing at him and telling him that he deserved it. Even his two teenage daughters would have been laughing right in his face afterwards. Then again, I have never been much of a Billy Bush fan. He is crass, callous, and arrogant, and almost everyone who has ever worked with him cannot stand him. After he left Access Hollywood Live, everyone there was glad to get rid of him. YouTuber Nicki Swift even exposed him for the persona non grata that he is, in her YouTube video below.
Billy Bush Is Not Very Well Liked
2. Marriage Laws Should Not Necessarily Be Aligned With Statutory-Age-Of-Consent Laws
Ms. Wintrow criticized the opponents of her marriage bill for not wanting to align the marriage laws with the statutory rape laws in her state. The likely reason that these legislators who voted this bill down do not wish to align the marriage laws with the statutory rape laws in their state is because there are so many things wrong with the statutory rape laws throughout our nation, and Idaho is no exception. It infuriates me whenever Ms. Wintrow and others like her speak as though the statutory-age-of-consent laws throughout our nation are so fair and that the way they punish individuals who have a confrontation with them is so flawlessly perfect, when reality has it that her and her followers’ opinions could never be any further from the truth.
Our broken statutory-age-of-consent laws here in our nation are something that has been troubling our society for decades rather than for a mere few years. Back in 1986, a 15-year-old Connecticut girl refused to testify against her 28-year-old boyfriend in a statutory rape case that she did not bring against him, because she felt that the case was a witch hunt. Her father had pressed criminal charges against the 28-year-old man after he had discovered that this man was seeing the 15-year-old girl in secrecy. After the young girl refused to testify in that matter, the prosecutor brought contempt-of-court charges against her; and the judge in that matter sent her to a lockup for minors. Then for the first time in American history, child advocates, feminists, and even opponents of Draconian statutory-age-of-consent laws had come together and had become more unified than they could ever have been in their efforts to free this young girl from incarceration. The 15-year-old girl’s father had no problem with the judge’s decision to lock the girl up, which is something that I cannot understand to this very day. Okay, I get it. Perhaps the father wanted to find a way to get his daughter away from her 28-year-old boyfriend. However, in figurative words, if a parent wants to do something like that, they send their 15-year-old daughter to Baltimore to live with her aunt, Bessie, rather than agreeing for her to be sent to a juvenile detention facility. Anyone who has ever seen the movie titled Born Innocent starring Linda Blair in which there was a bottle-rape scene knows that juvenile detention facilities are not safe places for teenage girls to be, to say the least. Horror stories come out of those places even to this very day. However, this father appeared to have had his head deep in the clouds. Anyhow, to make a long story short, the 15-year-old girl was eventually released after the judge received so much pressure from the public at large to free her. The statutory rape case against her boyfriend eventually went south. Opponents of the rigid statutory-age-of-consent laws here in our nation even praised this 15-year-old girl for standing up against our despotic criminal justice system. It’s exactly like the age-old saying that says that you can take the horse to the water, but you cannot make it drink. At the end of the day, the authorities were out to make this “statutory rape” case about themselves rather than about the welfare of the 15-year-old girl, so to speak. Otherwise, they would not have treated her like a criminal for refusing to go along with their witch hunt against her boyfriend. They only showed themselves to be self-serving hypocrites, and they were merely looking to have their cake and eat it too rather than pursuing any kind of meaningful justice for anyone.
What is so appalling is that to this very day, prosecutors are able to charge teenage girls with contempt of court if they refuse to testify against a boyfriend in a statutory rape case. In New York, a 16-year-old girl is even automatically charged with contempt of court AS AN ADULT, if she refuses to testify against her older boyfriend in a “statutory rape” case against him inasmuch as the statutory age of consent in New York is 17 years old. Now, let me get this. A 16-year-old girl in New York automatically gets charged with contempt of court as an adult for refusing to testify against her older boyfriend in a “statutory rape” case, because the law there deems her to be too young to be having sexual relations with an adult man but old enough to be charged with a crime as an adult. It seems like a double standard to me. In any event, it does not take a rocket scientist to deduce that our statutory-age-of-consent laws have only gotten worse rather than better with time.
Another more recent incident that shows how broken our statutory-age-of-consent laws are here in the United States of America is one in which a 34-year-old woman was walking home drunk one night in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The 16-year-old son of a female acquaintance of hers saw the 34-year-old woman walking down the street in an inebriated state, and he offered to help her get home safely. However, this young boy had ulterior motives when he walked her home, because, not too long thereafter, the police came knocking on her front door to arrest her on a charge of statutory rape. She was completely bewildered by their actions, but it turned out that, unbeknownst to her, the 16-year-old boy had engaged in sexual intercourse with her while she was out cold from being drunk on that night that he had walked her home. In other words, the 16-year-old boy’s parents had charged her with statutory rape, even though she was the one who had gotten raped and the 16-year-old boy was the rapist. Now, some of you middle-aged women out there may be asking yourselves what a teenage boy would want with you. However, teenage boys are capable of raping any woman of any age. The YouTube video below describes a 15-year-old boy who raped a 64-year-old woman.
A Teenage Male Minor Is Prosecuted For Raping A 64-Year-Old Woman
In any event, there can be no question that the statutory-age-of-consent laws throughout our nation have become a debacle ever since overzealous child advocates began encouraging lawmakers back in the 1980s to pass tougher laws against sex offenses involving minors without first researching the adverse impact that these laws have on individuals whose actions have nothing to do with these same laws’ legislative intent. The complexity of today's youth here in our nation necessitate that the statutory-age-of-consent laws be reformed throughout our country so that the wrong people are not being prosecuted in situations where no harm has occurred and nobody is involved in anything that is against their will.
3. Proponents Of Laws To Ban Underage Marriage In Our Nation Should Stop Misusing Sensationalistic Stories To Promote Their Agenda
While Democratic Representative Melissa Wintrow has pushed her marriage bill to the people of Idaho, every so often the press and the media have unjustly brought up this one sensationalistic story about a 24-year-old man who got his 14-year-old girlfriend drunk and then had sexual intercourse with her while she was unconscious and got her pregnant in Idaho. Societal fundamentalists attempting to ban underage marriage in our nation latched onto this story and purposely searched for other stories like it that they could scrape from the bottom of the barrel to elicit knee-jerk reactions from the public and to promote their agenda. To make that long story short, let me point out that the 14-year-old girl’s father and stepmother did encourage the young girl to marry the 24-year-old man. However, the marriage did not take place in Idaho. And, yes, I do feel that the 14-year-old girl’s biological mother had every right to intervene in that situation and have the 24-year-old man arrested and prosecuted for rape, because, after all, he performed sexual intercourse with the young girl against her will. He is now in prison for his crimes where he belongs. However, the problem that I am having with this story is that proponents of laws against underage marriage have been inappropriately using this story to promote their agenda. What do I mean by “inappropriately”? Well, here’s the thing. Levi Johnston committed the exact same crime against former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol Palin, back when she was a teenage schoolgirl, but the press and the media in general never really seemed to take that incident as seriously as they should have simply because of the mere four-month age difference between Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin. He may not have gotten her pregnant immediately, but he eventually did so not too long thereafter. Unfortunately, in the eyes of our society, being the same age or almost the same age as an adolescent girl somehow seems to give a teenage boy a free pass to violate her any way he pleases. To know this fact, all we have to do is read the news on Yahoo. Nevertheless, what Levi Johnston did was still a crime, and he should be serving time in prison right now rather than being allowed to play house with his dunce of a wife, Sunny Oglesby. The following YouTube video below provides all the details of what happened in that incident.
Upon attempting to click onto the video below, do not be alarmed if you get a message stating that the video is not available. In that event, there will be an option that will read “Watch on YouTube.” Click onto that option, and it will bring up the video in a separate tab.
Bristol Palin Alleges That Levi Johnston Stole Her Virginity
According to the above video, similarly to the incident between the 14-year-old Idaho girl and her 24-year-old boyfriend, Levi Johnston got Bristol Palin drunk when she was a teenage schoolgirl and had sexual intercourse with her while she was out cold. It was not revealed how old she was at the time. She may have been 16 years old or she may have only been 14 years old, but she was definitely still a minor at the time of the incident. She was 13 years old when she began dating Levi Johnston. No matter how you look at it, Levi Johnston committed rape. Bristol Palin has been docile to Levi Johnston about the incident probably because she does not want her child, Tripp, to know what kind of creep his father really is. Robin Roberts has a reputation of being a diehard liberal who has no love lost with the Republicans, and even she implied in so many words to Bristol Palin in their interview that Levi Johnston had raped her. Now, let me make this point. What Levi Johnston did to Bristol Palin was reprehensible and unconscionable. Despite his actions, Bristol Palin agreed to marry him twice. The first time she agreed to do so was when she was 17 years old and the second time that she agreed to do so was when she was 19 years old, but, of course, they never went through with their wedding plans. In spite of her kindness toward him, he continued to find more and more inventive ways to degrade and belittle her. Moreover, he misused his and Bristol Palin’s son, Tripp, as a bargaining chip. He has definitely earned his reputation as one of our nation’s most notorious deadbeat teenage fathers, and he is the face of justifiable patricide. He reminds me of the baby daddy in the movie titled Fifteen And Pregnant whom everyone hated by the end of the movie. Here is a clip of that film starring Kirsten Dunst in which the baby daddy makes a surprise appearance at the hospital maternity ward with his new girlfriend while his 15-year-old baby mama is going through labor.
Kirsten Dunst Delivers A Spectacular Performance In This Movie Scene
The second time that Bristol Palin was engaged to Levi Johnston, he even went as far as telling her shortly before their scheduled wedding that he could not marry her inasmuch as he had possibly gotten another girl pregnant. It turned out that the girl he was referring to was Sunny Oglesby. Call me harsh if you must, but I’ve always viewed Sunny Oglesby to be a trashy woman whose moral compass is no better than that of Levi Johnston. Of course, that is another Steemit article for another time. It bewilders me on why there are people who actually sympathize with human garbage like Levi Johnston and even idolize him to this very day. Joy Behar certainly proved herself to be a hypocritical femi-Nazi hag when she had him on her television show and drooled all over him as though he were some kind of Greek god. I mean, here she is supposed to be a feminist who supports the Me Too Movement, and she was on her television show, acting as though she wanted to marry this creep who was really a rapist. Below is a YouTube video showing Joy Behar having this same interview with him.
Joy Behar Sides With An Enemy To Her So-Called Belief System
It greatly disgusts me that The Young Turks of YouTube have stated to the public in one of their videos that they believe that Bristol Palin was lying about Levi Johnston having stolen her virginity while she was intoxicated and physically unable to resist his sexual advances, when Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks had the actual audacity to imply in one of their subsequent videos that teenage marriage was a legalized form of rape. How much more hypocritical can The Young Turks get? Cenk Uygur has taken on professional journalist Carlson Tucker in televised debates in the past, and Mr. Uygur has only ended up making a fool out of himself after Mr. Tucker has shown how much more knowledgeable he is about so many topics than Mr. Uygur. In any event, there can be no question that Levi Johnston messed up Bristol Palin’s life and forever altered her future for the worse. However, are we going to take the above-described incident between Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin and use it to promote laws that would ban anyone of any age from getting married? Of course not. Therefore, it makes no sense to allow the public to be brainwashed into believing that the above-aforementioned sensationalistic story about a 24-year-old man getting his 14-year-old girlfriend drunk and then impregnating her by raping her somehow justifies outlawing any and all marriage in the state of Idaho before the age of 16 and making it more difficult for 16- and 17-year-old minors to get married in that same state.
4. Democratic Representative Melissa Wintrow Was Unwilling To Negotiate Any Middle Ground With Her Opponents On Her Marriage Bill
Ms. Wintrow whined in her interview with Newsweek on what a sad day she felt it was in Idaho after the majority of that state’s legislators decided that her marriage law simply wasn’t a good idea. However, if she really believed that her marriage law was a good idea and that the people of Idaho wanted it, she could have just as easily swayed those same legislators to allow her to place a proposition on her state’s November ballot to give the voters the opportunity to decide whether or not that bill was to become a law in that state. I’m sure that the opponents of her marriage bill would have had no problem with allowing her to go down that road, because they all likely would have known what the results of it would have been, which would not have been in her favor. However, she did not do so, because she obviously knew that the voters of Idaho did not want this law and that they were smart enough not to be talked into voting for it. None of these societal fundamentalists anywhere in our nation have gone down this road in their efforts to pass these kinds of laws, because they know that their agenda is very unpopular and that their supporters just happen to yell a little louder than the silent majority does. However, whenever their supporters yell out loud to pass such laws, nothing intelligent ever comes out of their mouths. These people have a my-way-or-the-highway kind of attitude regarding their agenda.
Societal fundamentalists like Ms. Wintrow and her supporters will give a whole lecture to the public at large about how 15-, 14-, 13-, and 12-year-old girls are so fragile and vulnerable to abuse and exploitation and, therefore, should not be allowed to wed legally. I’m not denying that girls this age can and do fall into difficult situations whenever they become sexually active, especially when they do not feel ready to do so. However, whenever these same societal fundamentalists get a telephone call from an angry mother telling them that their 15-year-old son has gotten her 13- or 14-year-old daughter pregnant, they go throwing all of that same propaganda of theirs right out the window and then these young girls suddenly become hussies and Jezebels to them in their arrogant opinions. I can smell a hypocrite from a thousand miles away, and these societal fundamentalists fit that description quite accurately.
5. The Comments Section To The Newsweek Magazine Article Was Like Sheep In A Herd
Upon reading the comments section to the Newsweek article titled “REPUBLICAN CONTROLLED IDAHO CONGRESS REJECTS BILL TO END CHILD MARRIAGE FOR THOSE UNDER THE AGE OF 16,” I felt myself confronting a circus full of clueless individuals riding around in their colossal clown car. Some of the people in the comments section expressed fears that dirty old men would come flocking to Idaho in search of prospective 9- and 10-year-old brides. I don’t think so. Judges in state jurisdictions throughout our nation that have no age floor for marriage still adhere to the English Common Law that forbids girls any younger than 12 years of age and boys any younger than 14 years of age from getting married under any circumstances. Some of these people in the comments section lumped teenage brides in together with prepubescent girls marrying at 7 and 8 years old. After making such comments, what gives these individuals the right to pass judgment on the Idaho state legislators who opposed Ms. Wintrow’s marriage bill? These people commenting have minds that are twisted in their thinking in that they cannot differentiate adolescents from small children. The self-appointed pedo-experts simply had to throw their two cents in as well.
Nevertheless, what I did find so interesting in the comments section was this one person who went by the username of “JoshGilbert.” He was clearly in favor of marriage laws that disallowed minors to wed. However, various citations that he made therein from different news sources contradicted his opinion that adolescent girls were too young to marry. In one of his comments therein, he stated that he believed that girls do mature faster than boys and then he cited research results from Time magazine, Psychology Today, and Telegraph. At the end of his comment, he emphasized that it was a universally accepted scientific fact that females matured faster than males. My response to his comment is that if all of this research he cited is correct, then it supports the fact that a significant number of adolescent girls of middle-school and high-school age can enter and have entered into marriages that have proven to be successful in the long run despite that their husbands may have been slightly or significantly older than them. Instead of supporting the findings of Unchained At Last, these same research studies would cause one to question the findings of that same organization as having a hidden purpose of promoting an agenda that is not likely in the best interest of the American people. If you read my article titled “The Great American Controversy Over Underage Marriage,” you will get the details regarding this agenda and how it could harm our nation if it becomes a solid reality in every state jurisdiction of our country.
6. Conclusion To This Topic
The Idaho state legislature made the right choice in rejecting a bill that would have ended marriage in their state for those younger than 16 years of age and would have made it more difficult for 16- and 17-year-old minors to wed. The statutory-age-of-consent laws throughout our nation are broken and send the wrong people to prison and put the wrong people on the sex offender registry. It is good that Idaho has a marriage law currently on its books that allows for its judicial system to weed the good apples out from the bad apples whenever there is a situation in which two individuals in love with each other just so happen to be on opposite sides of the legal age line and their relationship has been proven to be authentic and sound. This current marriage law provides them with a pathway to make their relationship fully legal as it should be. Idaho should serve as a positive example and a model to other states to reject any similar marriage bills that come to their legislatures for review and to maintain the status quo. If your state legislature has shoved a law like this down your throat, you have the right to petition your elected officials to allow for a proposition, a question, or a measure to be placed on your November ballot that would give voters the right to decide the fate of these same laws. Fraidy Reiss and Jeanne Smoot are not our friends, and neither are their organizations – Unchained At Last and The Tahirih Justice Center. We all must stand up to this tyranny that is currently making its way through the state legislatures in our nation, because if we choose to sit back and allow for it to take control of our lives, it will eventually make its way to our Congress in Washington, D.C. and, by then, too much irreparable harm will have ensued.
This article is copyright-protected.
Hey there great to see you wrote something new! I am finally starting to get back in here I am feeling more myself again. anyway I read through this whole thing and once again you never fail to leave me thinking and I always leave learning something new. I will leave my thoughts on this soon but you really explained well as always. Also I see your introduction post too which I will be getting too. I have so much to catch up on in my absence but now I have a bunch of new treats to enjoy now that I am back.
I was glad to hear from you, naglfar94. I was unable to post anything for three months because of a glitch on the Steemit writing site, which was most of the summer. This situation had been happening to numerous Steemians, and, luckily, a group of developers were able to nip the problem in the bud. Anyhow, I'm glad to get my posting capabilities back here on Steemit, and one of my fellow Steemians gave me some valuable help so that I could post more consistently. Anyhow, keep in contact. I'm always interested in reading what you have to say about my articles.
Naglfar94? Have you noticed that the search feature on Steemit seems to be disabled? Whenever I click on the magnifying glass icon, I get a blank screen with a white rectangle where a field used to be where one normally could type in their search. That white rectangle is missing that field. This has been going on for a while. I alerted the people on Steemchat about it, and someone encouraged me to report it on this one website where Steemians can submit complaints about technical problems with the Steemit writing site. However, I'm trying to find out if this is just happening to me or to other Steemians as well. Do you experience the same problem whenever you try to use the search feature on Steemit? Let me know.
Like steemit glitched out for me just now when I tried to get to this comment to reply to it. it said that this page was not here anymore but then I refreshed and what do you know? it was here. Anyway I have not personally experienced or saw anything odd when it came to the search bar when I searched in it it goes just fine for me. I have noticed one thing the resteem button does not seem to be here anymore?? I like to share some of your articles to my own steemit but this one I could not do so.
Yeah, the search feature here on Steemit appears to be working now, which is good. There must have been enough complaints about it that one of the developers finally did something about it. Hopefully, it will stay the way it is.
Congratulations @epicenterdefacto! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPVote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!
Thank you! :-)