tftproject? Okay, I realize that I have just walked into the lion's den, because I disagree with this knee-jerk reaction throughout our country to ban all marriage before 18 years old. If you're talking about stopping little girls from getting married at 8 or 9 years old to men who have a history of abusing children, then I'm completely on board with you. And, yes, the thought of a kid marrying at 10 years old does make me feel uncomfortable. However, first of all, I think that too much writer's license is getting misused to define what is and is not pedophilia. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), a pedophile is an adult or adolescent over the age of 16 years old who is sexually attracted to a prepubescent child who is 5 or more years younger than him or her. Therefore, it does not do justice to take a situation of a 14- or 15-year-old girl marrying her 18-, 19- or 20-year-old boyfriend and equate it to a scenario in which a career child predator grabs a 3-year-old toddler from a playground to victimize. In fact, usually in situations in which a girl in her early to middle teens marries her older boyfriend, one of the couple's objectives is to disassociate themselves from pedophilia as much as possible, which is understandable. John Walsh, the co-founder of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, warned the nation in a television interview against the swing of the pendulum to the extreme right. Here is a man who began his relationship with his wife when he was 22 years old and she was 16 years, and he is about as anti-pedophile as they come, because, after all, it was a pedophile who raped and murdered his 6-year-old son Adam Walsh.

Second of all, there are just so many things wrong with this child marriage bill pending legislation in Kentucky. For example, the idea of a 17-year-old girl having a 4-year age limit on whom she can marry seems way out of line. This type of law was ratified in Florida, and it is definitely going to fail. Yes, I would like to see teenage boys step up to the plate and take responsibility whenever they get their teenage girlfriends pregnant, because deadbeat teenage fathers became a problem in our nation long before Levi Johnston pulled his number on Bristol Palin back in the previous decade. However, this same provision in that bill assumes that somehow being the same age as each other is going to magically make everything better for a 17-year-old bride and her husband. Macauley Culkin and Rachel Miner were both 17 years old when they got married back in the 1990s, and their marriage ended in disaster after only two years; whereas Loretta Lynn was 13 years old when she married a 21-year-old man by the name of Doolittle Lynn, and they were married right up until Doolittle Lynn died. I'm all for a societal war against pedophilia, but let's not throw Loretta-Lynn-style marriages into the cesspool of child sexual exploitation if they don't belong there. Donna Pollard has continued to misuse her personal tragedy with her previous marriage to mislead the public to believe that all Loretta-Lynn-style marriages are a form of legalized child rape, when, in fact, they are not. She is someone with a personal agenda rather than someone on a genuine mission to do good for society. I say that the failure of this marriage bill is the best thing that could ever happen to Kentucky.

What the Tahirih Justice Center, Unchained At Last and all these other extremist organizations supporting such a bill are looking to do is attempt to turn our nation into some kind of self-defined age-appropriate Utopia of same-age romances, but it is so not happening. Instead, their actions are going to turn our nation into one massive maximum security prison in which we all will be electing a warden every four years instead of a president. That is, our prisons will be overcrowded and the sex offender registries throughout our nation will be so overwhelmed that they will end up becoming even more poorly managed than they are now.

If this is something that has so much popular support, as you claim, then it should be decided by the people instead of by the state legislators. If the proponents of this bill in Kentucky were so confident that everyone wanted it, they would have placed it on their November ballot as a proposition, measure or question, depending on how their voting system works. Because this bill would affect many people if it were to pass, don't you at least agree with me that it should be the Kentucky voters themselves who decide the fate of it instead of the Kentucky state legislators?

The proponents of this bill aren't even willing to compromise any middle ground with the opponents of it. For example, how is it right that a teenage girl of school age can be charged with contempt-of-court if she refuses to testify in a "statutory rape" case against her older boyfriend inasmuch as she does not wish to partake in what she feels to be a witch hunt? If the proponents of this bill were to offer to change the law to provide legal immunity to all adolescents against contempt-of-court charges in such criminal cases, I think perhaps people would begin to accept the idea of making 18 years old a solid marriageable age throughout our nation. However, these people alongside the criminal justice system simply want to have their cake and eat it too. In other words, they want to treat the same youngsters they deem to be victims as criminals in the event that these same youngsters refuse to cater to their agenda. It just doesn't work that way, and that is not justice. I say that the failure of this marriage bill to pass legislation is the best thing that could ever happen to Kentucky.