The Great American Controversy Over Underage Marriage [Part D]

[Please Read The Table Of Contents, Part A, Part B And Part C Of This Article Before Reading The Segment Below]

The Age-Of-Consent Laws’ Relationship To Teenage Marriage

Unlike Argentina and Germany, the statutory-age-of-consent laws across our nation are already unconstitutionally too broad and have little or no safeguards in them, if any, to keep the wrong people from being convicted and sent to prison under these same laws. Eliminating the marriage exception in the statutory-age-of-consent laws across our nation altogether would bring our country one step closer to becoming a Fascist totalitarian police state. Our prison system is already the largest in the world, and we do not need to be looking for inventive ways to incarcerate more individuals needlessly than before. I may not be an IT specialist either, but I would not be the least bit surprised if the sex offender registry database across the nation were someday to crash as a result of these fanatical femi-Nazis’ efforts to impose even greater austerity in our juvenile-related laws than before. If an occurrence like that could possibly happen, then the results of such a major event might turn our country into a scene out of the 1968 film titled Night of the Living Dead on steroids. That is, we would no longer have any way of knowing who the truly dangerous sex offenders were that may be walking among us out in public in that event. Australia has rigid marriage laws that prevent anyone from getting married before 18 years of age in which judicial dispensations for someone to get married at 16 or 17 years old are seldom ever granted, and their age-of-consent laws are a disaster.

Despite any pipedreams that any self-proclaimed child advocate or fanatical femi-Nazi may have of turning our culture into some kind of age-appropriate, age-perfect utopia for everyone, so to speak, reality has it that our society simply cannot have its cake and eat it too in that same respect. Unchained At Last’s efforts to rid each and every state jurisdiction of underage marriage coupled with the ridiculously Draconian statutory-age-of-consent laws on our law books across the nation reminds me of the movie titled THX 1138 starring Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasance about a futuristic society in which any and all sexual intimacy was completely forbidden.

Some of you may not know it, but the amount of people who have been leaving the United States of America and renouncing their American citizenship has increased dramatically throughout the presidential administration of Barack Obama since the time that he first took office back in 2009. There was even one year during his time in office when over 4,000 people left our country and renounced their American citizenship. As a result, President Obama eventually instituted an administrative fee of over $2,000 for anyone to expatriate permanently from our nation. There is only one other country in the world that I know of that charges this kind of administrative fee for someone to expatriate and renounce their citizenship from that country. I once did recall former presidential candidate Ted Cruz mentioning about some kind of Federal law that forcibly rescinded one’s American citizenship if that individual left our country to join ISIS. Of course, that is another article for another time. If the laws in our country continue to become more and more Draconian and oppressive, my prediction is that more Americans will permanently expatriate and renounce their American citizenship despite the administrative fee that President Obama imposed upon them to do so. I can only hope that President Trump will be able to turn this situation around for the better so that our nation does not continue to lose good people.

A YouTuber news group known as The Young Turks also put out a similar YouTube video as the one described previously regarding the topic of underage marriage, and they titled it “America’s Child Marriage Problem.” Not only was the title of that video itself sensationalistic, but The Young Turks also used the tacky ploy of exhibiting a picture of a little girl barely out of kindergarten in a wedding dress on their thumbnail. The video set forth mostly the same tainted, specious points and pieces of information or rather misinformation that Tabetha Wallace did in her YouTube video. Cenk Uygur, a Turkish-American, stated in the video that if an 18-year-old man married his 17-year-old girlfriend, then it was no problem. Then he added that if a man over 21 years old married a 12- or 13-year-old girl, then it was a problem inasmuch as it would normally constitute statutory rape if both the man and the young girl were to have sexual relations outside the confines of marriage. However, this is where I wholeheartedly have to disagree with him.

Because statutory rape is only rape as defined by a statute in the criminal code of law, the marriage exception to it is every bit relevant to whether or not a crime has actually been committed. Moreover, Cenk Uygur implied in his above-described statement that the age difference in an underage marriage was ultimately the determining factor on whether or not the marriage was going to work out. However, that is not really the case. Take the example of Macauley Culkin and Rachel Miner. In figurative words, they were two 17-year-old movie entertainers with more money than God when they initially got married in the late 1990s. However, their clown-car marriage did not last for more than two years, and they ultimately got legally divorced after four years from the time that they had wedded. On the other hand, the country singer, Loretta Lynn, was 13 years old when she wedded 21-year-old Oliver Vanetta “Doolittle” Lynn, Jr. Doolittle Lynn invested his time, money, and hard work into helping Loretta Lynn build her career as a musician from the time that they both got married. They both remained married right up until Doolittle Lynn died in 1996. Such examples show precisely how wrong Mr. Uygur was in his assertion.

One valid point that Mr. Uygur did bring up in the The Young Turks’ YouTube video was that some teenagers felt a mad rush of hormones while they had been indoctrinated to believe that premarital sex was wrong. Therefore, these teenagers felt encouraged to get married well before they were 18 years old. CBS News did publish an online article to that effect back in 2002.  As I have stressed repeatedly herein and I shall continue to stress again and again, tolerance does not equal encouragement. Just because our society may tolerate adolescents getting married while they still may be in high school or even middle school, it does not mean that our society is necessarily encouraging this practice. We are just allowing for it, because many of us understand that our criminal justice system is not always the fairest one whenever the age-of-consent laws are involved in a situation where two individuals fall in love who may just happen to be on the opposite sides of the legal age line. At the same time, it doesn’t mean that we cannot put legal safeguards in place to prevent abuses from happening in underage marriages.

Misandristic femi-Nazi propaganda regarding underage marriage and any kind of interaction between adolescent girls and adult men in general has run rampant in the press and the media over the course of the past decade. Now this one YouTuber named Trainer Jax is even feeding this nonsense to the public at large and saying that 50-something-year-old men are taking on the psychological identities of 16-year-old boys to hook up with 14- and 15-year-old girls. After I heard her make that statement in her YouTube video below, I knew for certain that she was on a man-hating warpath inasmuch as she gradually shifted her presentation to badmouthing any adult man who participated in underage marriage.

Beware Of Femi-Nonsensical Propaganda Regarding Underage Marriage

I don’t know about you, but I am yet to meet a 50-something-year-old man who fits the description of a trans-age individual who believes to be a 16-year-old boy. I don’t think that comedian Andy Milonakis would even entertain such a notion ten years from now when he enters into his fifties, even if he still looks like the 15-year-old boy that he appears to be now.

Unless you have lived under a rock for a long time, it is no secret that adolescent-adult relationships and even marriages are quite common in both the world of entertainment and even the world of politics. When the United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Dr. Ben Carson, began running for president in 2015, it was revealed to the public that his mother was 13 years old and his father was 28 years old when his parents first got married. Elvis Presley was 24 years old and Priscilla Presley was only 14 years old when the couple first met. Actress Loni Andersen once admitted in a television interview that she had dated a 22-year-old man when she was just 12 years old.

Many of you might remember the actress, Tippi Hedren, who starred in the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock classic movie titled The Birds. When her daughter, Melanie Griffith, was 13 years old, Tippi Hedren had occasion to work in a movie with actor, Don Johnson, who at the time was 22 years old, back in the early 1970s. Shortly thereafter, Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson hooked up with each other despite their age difference. When Melanie Griffith was 14 years old, she moved in with Don Johnson. Tippi Hedren was not happy about it. Eventually, Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith got married. Perhaps their marriage and relationship were on and off. However, they both prospered in their respective entertainment careers. Interestingly enough, after Oprah Winfrey invited Ms. Griffith onto her television talk show, Ms. Winfrey expressed no objection to the fact that Ms. Griffith was in her early teens and Mr. Johnson was in his twenties when the couple first became an item despite that Ms. Winfrey has repeatedly publicized her support for tougher age-of-consent laws throughout our country.

Back in the 1970s, the late actor and movie director, John Derek, had an even more controversial romantic relationship with actress Bo Derek when he first met her. He was in his mid-forties and she was 15 or 16 years old when they first met. While they were both over in Europe shooting a movie, the authorities back in California somehow got wind that their relationship was much more than just professional; and an arrest and extradition warrant was immediately issued against John Derek in an effort to charge him with statutory rape. Luckily, John Derek and Bo Derek found out about it before the authorities were able to reach them. Then both of them fled from one country to another in Europe to stay ahead of the authorities before they could zero in on them. Actress Linda Evans decided to run interference to help the couple, and she contacted public officials whom she knew in high places to make the statutory rape rap go away and allow for them to return to the United States of America without facing any problems from the authorities. Eventually, John Derek and Bo Derek got married. Bo Derek remained married to John Derek right up until he died in the 1990s.

Billy Wyman of the Rolling Stones flirted with taboos at the age of 47 in 1983 when he hooked up with Mandy Smith, who at the time was only 13 years old. Mr. Wyman eventually married Ms. Smith. I won’t deny that both of them came from wild families and that they let the good times roll. However, their relationship and eventual marriage did not have any detrimental impact on the record sales of the rock band – the Rolling Stones. Therefore, I don’t think the fans of that rock band took the news of this relationship and eventual marriage too harshly.

Not long ago, actor Doug Hutchison started a similar relationship with a model named Courtney Stodden. Mr. Hutchison was in his fifties, and Ms. Stodden was 16 years old. However, he played it safe and he did not consummate his relationship with her until after they were legally married. Because it was the twenty-first century by the time this couple got married, they became overwhelmed with hostility and disapproval from the public. Unfortunately, their marriage did not last, and it was likely because of the constant social pressures that they endured from the public. However, if they had been transported back to the 1970s in a time machine and had gotten married, I believe that their marriage would have lasted indefinitely. Also, quite frankly, I saw very little difference between their marriage and Billy Joel’s marriage to Alexis Roderick.

When French Canadian singer, Celine Dion, was 12 years old, she fell in love with Rene Angelil, who at the time was in his late thirties. To this very day, the question over when Mr. Angelil became responsive to Ms. Dion’s flirtations and expressions of romantic interest remains a mystery. After Ms. Dion married Mr. Angelil, their marriage became as solid as a rock. I’ve read hateful comments that people have posted on Facebook and other blog sheets on how they feel that Mr. Angelil manipulated Ms. Dion in some way. My response to that accusation is that it is nonsense on its face. Unfortunately, these same narrow-minded people here in our country continued to snipe at them and accuse their relationship of being an abomination to all decency. My response to these narrow-minded people’s logic or rather lack thereof is that I would much rather have a married couple like Ms. Dion and Mr. Angelil as my next-door neighbors than some clown-car family like the Duggars of 19 Kids And Counting.

The mistake that too many Americans make is putting self-righteous do-gooders like the Duggars high up on pedestals only to find out that they have multiple sordid family secrets hiding in their closet in the form of Joshua Duggar. The best thing that the TLC cable network ever did was to cancel 19 Kids And Counting altogether. Many people were happy to see that television show go off the air, because many people got sick and tired of seeing Jim Bob Duggar and Michelle Duggar brag about being high-school sweethearts and living an exemplary life, so to speak. It was apparent to me that there was something off about Jim Bob Duggar when he constantly flashed a picture taken of him from when he was 15 years old as though his whole life centered around being a high-school sweetheart, a glittering prom king and a young groom. People like the Duggars make me want to barf, and they always pass judgment on others.

Celine Dion is now approaching her fifties, and the debate over how her relationship with her late husband came into existence still continues on to this very day. A docudrama movie that I saw on television depicted their relationship as not becoming serious until after Ms. Dion was out of high school, even though Ms. Dion professed her love emphatically to Mr. Angelil when she was 16 years old. No matter what may have happened, the fact of the matter is that Ms. Dion and Mr. Angelil were a happily married couple right up until Mr. Angelil’s recent death, and they procreated three terrific children that proved their love for each other. When I saw the docudrama movie about Ms. Dion and there was a scene in which she was still a young adult and she broke into tears after a news reporter had asked her about her love life inasmuch as she was too afraid to mention anything about her relationship with Mr. Angelil because of their age difference and the biased way that Americans apparently viewed these relationships, I nearly felt that I was going to break down and cry myself. Now, I realize that Ms. Dion did not marry Mr. Angelil until she was in her twenties. However, she and her husband still should not have had to live that way at the outset of their relationship. As far as I am concerned, their relationship and marriage were not that much different from that of one of our presidents, Grover Cleveland, with Frances Folsom.

Back in 2012, there was another relationship that began under much more disciplined circumstances than that of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson. A Chinese musician named Zhang Muyi, who was 24 years old at the time, began dating a 12-year-old Canadian singer/model of Japanese/German/Chinese descent named Akama Miki. American news commentators were sniping at Zhang Muyi from all directions, and Americans were posting hateful comments about it all over the Internet. Even The Young Turks invested their energies on YouTube into chastising Zhang Muyi every way they could think of for his romantic interest in Akama Miki. It greatly bewildered me why Americans or even British people would even be concerned about this couple, because they lived in a different part of the world and had been taught different cultural values. This same couple had the most formal courtship that I had ever heard of, and Mr. Muyi became a target for accusations of moral turpitude from all directions, mainly from Americans, even after two years that this couple had been together. This couple is currently still engaged, but I am optimistic that they will be getting married in the near future.

Anyhow, it is incredible how so many people continue to be insistent that Mr. Muyi manipulated Akama Miki, even though he played by every rule that a formal courtship entailed. Okay. Akama was 12 years old when they first fell in love with each other. However, here is where I have a major problem with all the criticisms and derisions that individuals cast upon Mr. Muyi as well as all the comments that people made on the Internet about how they felt that Akama was somehow a victim. Yes, he was over a decade older than this girl when he formed a romance with her, and she was barely an adolescent. However, if she had been a 12-year-old American girl whom some 14-year-old punk had impregnated, bailed on, and “slut-shamed” before her peers, the same people who posted comments online about how they saw her as a victim would have been ostracizing her instead. This line of double thinking makes absolutely no sense to me. The bottom line is that Zhang Muyi had honorable intentions for Akama Miki right from the beginning, and he proved so after he married her recently. On the other hand, you will find numerous stories all over YouTube and the Internet regarding 12-year-old girls whose 13- or 14-year-old boyfriends have used them and have thrown them away like a cheap piece of toilet paper after they have gotten them pregnant. Watch this video below about a 12-year-old girl named Haylee Jules whose 14-year boyfriend named Brandon got her pregnant and then changed into a horrible person after she told him about the pregnancy, and you will get some idea of what I mean.

Some of you older individuals reading my article may or may not realize that adolescents are living much less sheltered lives nowadays than they did decades ago. All you have to do is watch the 2003 film titled Thirteen starring Debra Winters and Evan Rachel Wood as well as another film that Ms. Wood starred in two years later titled Pretty Persuasion, and you will see the difference between the way adolescents are now and the way they were when you were a teenager. The 1950s proved to be much more innocent times for adolescents when the singing duo Patience and Prudence first appeared on the music entertainment scene. However, strangely enough, unlike other societies, our society adamantly continues to keep itself trapped inside a Puritanical black hole with respect to moral issues regarding adolescents.

It is no secret that there is a diametric difference between how our society here in the United States of America views any kind of relationship between an adult man and an adolescent girl and how other cultures view it throughout the world. All we have to do is compare American movies with foreign films, and the proof will appear directly in the pudding. That is, American society stigmatizes such relationships and even marriages, whereas European societies (minus the United Kingdom) don’t seem to have as much of a problem with it. I exclude the United Kingdom from being as open-minded in this sense as other European countries, because the British have clearly been getting upset about teenage girls grazing outside their own pasture ever since Jerry Lee Lewis first stepped off an airplane with his then-13-year-old wife in London back in 1958.

In 1977, a Dutch film titled Het Debuut was released, and it was about a secret affair between a 14-year-old girl and a married man who was clearly not a spring chicken from the looks of him and his gray hair. I did not have the opportunity to see this film from beginning to end inasmuch as I have not found a copy of it with English subtitles. Anyhow, I have read a description of it on the IMDB movie website, and the way this movie is handled is that it does not show the forbidden relationship between the young girl and the middle-aged man in a negative light beyond that it is an extramarital affair. The movie never implies that the relationship is exploitative in any manner, and, in fact, it drives the extra mile to romanticize the relationship. On the other hand, an American film titled Indecent Seduction (For My Daughter’s Honor) was released in 1996, and this movie provides a similar plot to the above-described Dutch film in that it is about a forbidden relationship between a 14-year-old girl and a married man who is even closer in age difference to the young girl. The major difference in this movie is that it portrays the relationship between the adolescent girl and the adult man as exploitative and completely wrong.

Now, I know what many of you are going to say. You’ll accuse me of comparing oranges to apples, because both movies were made twenty years apart and the Dutch film was made during a decade when people did not take forbidden relationships between adolescent girls and adult men as seriously as nowadays. However, here is some food for thought. The Dutch film titled Het Debuut did come out in 1977, and I can appreciate the argument that there were not as many Edgar Maddison Welch wackos walking around, engaging in vigilante justice, so to speak, back then as there are now.  However, keep in mind that under no circumstances was the 1970s a playground for hedonistic behavior between adult men and underage adolescent girls. The year 1977 was the same year that then-40-something-year-old movie director Roman Polanski was arrested for having unlawful sexual contact with a 13-year-old girl named Samantha Gailey-Geimer. The statutory ages of consent may have been lower in many state jurisdictions throughout our nation back then than they are now, but adult men still got ostracized just as easily for what others viewed as stepping out of line with teenage girls, so to speak. Moreover, the statutory age of consent in the Netherlands was 21 years old up until the year 1990. Therefore, the Dutch movie titled Het Debuut was released at a time when an intimate relationship between a 14-year-old girl and a middle-aged man was clearly illegal in that country.

Nevertheless, if those of you who are contradicting my point insist upon doing so on the basis of the nearly 20-year time gap between the years that both above-described films were made, then allow me to give you yet another example. Many of you probably remember the movie titled Hard Candy that was released in 2005, which starred Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page. It was about a 32-year-old man who hooks up with a 14-year-old girl in an online chat room and takes her back to his residence in Los Angeles, and then the young girl drugs him and begins to torment him for what she believes to be his transgressions against girls her age. The name of her character is Hayley Stark, and she speaks to the 32-year-old man with venom in her voice after she has tied him up in a chair; and she talks to him as though he is no different than some creepy, old man in a trench coat who goes grabbing toddlers from playgrounds and pulling them into his car. On the other hand, an Italian film titled Ginger and Cinnamon was released only two or three years earlier than Hard Candy, and in that film, the 14-year-old female protagonist is found speaking with a 30-something-year-old man in a romantically affectionate manner. Comparing both films with each other only shows that most Western European nations don’t appear to stigmatize any sort of romantic interaction between adolescent girls and adult men, whereas, in our country, such interaction could become a recipe for criminal prosecution. Comparing these two films with each other makes it clear that there is a diametric difference between what Americans consider to be age-appropriate and what non-English-speaking Europeans consider to be age-appropriate in that same respect.  

Now, I completely get it. Some of you reading my article may have teenage daughters, and no parent wants their 13-year-old daughter to come home one day and tell them that she is pregnant with former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s baby. An incident of that nature would almost be like a terrifying scene out of the 1968 movie titled Rosemary’s Baby before and after Rosemary Woodhouse sees her newborn baby for the very first time. I am well aware that there are adult men who commit horrendous deeds against young girls. Tears fill my eyes whenever I hear a horror story about a girl in her early teens becoming pregnant as a result of a heinous crime that an older man has committed against her.  However, I am also skeptical to believe that the majority of those sexual deviants who engage in these kinds of atrocities have any honorable intentions of marrying the young girls upon whom they prey, and, for that reason, among others, I don’t believe that keeping underage marriage legal poses any threat to the well-being of every middle-school and high-school-aged girl in our nation so long as there are legal safeguards in place in the marriage laws, despite what any societal fundamentalist or fanatical femi-Nazi may be misleading the public at large to believe.

I am no different than most of you reading my article. I saw the Canadian film titled Wedding in White starring Carol Kane, Donald Pleasance, and Doug McGrath, which is about a 16-year-old girl whose father forces her to marry an elderly man after she becomes pregnant as a result of a violent rape, and I absolutely hated the male characters in that movie. However, among the adult men whom I’ve known to take an extra-Platonic interest in adolescent girls throughout my life, I have encountered both good and bad ones; and any parents who may be questioning how much of a moral compass I may personally have, I can assure you that I see this issue from the whole big picture rather than just with tunnel vision. I am here to elaborate on the topic of underage marriage from a bird’s eye view rather than just from a one-sided, narrow-minded standpoint.

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