Lawmakers Guarantee Old Men Can Marry Little Girls, Reject Bill to Ban "Legalized Rape of Children"
Frankfort, KY — A bill that would have banned adults from marrying children in Kentucky was struck down this week prompting outrage from politicians and activists alike.
Senate Bill 48, known as the "child bride" bill, was yanked from the agenda this week, just hours before a scheduled vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee. This is the second time in only two weeks that lawmakers have protected the depraved act of adults taking children as their spouses.
"SO disappointed! My SB 48 (outlaw child marriage) won’t be called for a vote," sponsor Julie Raque Adams, a Louisville Republican, said in a Tweet. "It is disgusting that lobbying organizations would embrace kids marrying adults. We see evidence of parents who are addicted, abusive, neglectful pushing their children into predatory arms. Appalling."
https://twitter.com/jrajra/status/969042437292417024
Other people reacting to the bill were a little more outspoken in their response.
"This is legalized rape of children," Eileen Recktenwald, the executive director of the Kentucky Association of Sexual Assault Programs said. "We cannot allow that to continue in Kentucky, and I cannot believe we are even debating this is the year 2018 in the United States."
Adams did not say who was lobbying against the bill, however, she noted that the opposition is allegedly concerned about parents' rights.
As it stands, currently in Kentucky, teens under 18 can marry adults at ages 16 and 17 with the permission of their parents. However, according to the current law, it is up to a judge to decide if a child under the age of 16 can marry an adult—and the girl must be pregnant. For obvious reasons, critics of the current law claim that a pregnant 13, 14, or 15-year-old girl—impregnated by the adult they are to marry—is evidence of a sex crime as a child cannot consent to sex. But it is the law nonetheless.
As the Courier-Journal reports,
"I had some problems with the bill," Sen. John Schickel, a Boone County Republican said Thursday in defiance of the bill. "Decisions involving a minor child should be made by a parent, not the court."The bill would establish 18 as the legal age for marriage. Those who are 17 could marry with permission of a district judge, if the age difference between the 17-year-old and the other party is fewer than four years.
But in cases of a minor marrying an adult, the judge would have to review material including any child abuse records involving the teen and check for any sex-offender records of the adult. The judge also would have to consider factors including the maturity and independence of the teen, determine that the teen has completed high school or obtained a GED and review any domestic violence records of either party.
The judge is to deny the request in cases including if the adult is in a position of authority over the minor, has a conviction for child abuse or a sexual offense, or if there is a pregnancy or child in common that established that the intended spouse was the perpetrator of a sex crime against a girl too young to consent.
However, other Republican lawmakers disagree.
"I know there are some concerns, but it's 2018 and it's definitely a problem," Sen. Wil Schroder, a Wilder Republican and a co-sponsor of SB 48, said.
"Unfortunately, parents make bad decisions sometimes and sometimes judges make bad decisions."
As TFTP has previously reported, this problem is not isolated to Kentucky. Laws across America have legalized pedophilia with children as young as 10-years-old and no one appears to be stopping it.
Girls as young as ten are among more than 200,000 children wed to adults in the United States in just the past 15 years, as — despite minimum requirements that a person reach the age of 18, or legal adulthood, nationally — a smattering of locations have preserved loopholes legally permitting child marriage.
Alarmingly, the number of children married away to fully mature adults could be much higher than the already-startling number — ten states provide only fragmentary statistics or none at all.
And the loopholes don’t exist solely in theory — adults across the U.S. have actively jumped at the opportunity to marry kids — even amid a decline in the number of marriages, overall.
To wit, three 10-year-old girls and an 11-year-old boy were among the hundreds of thousands of children and minors the system somehow permitted adults to lock into marriage — despite their bodies and minds not yet being fully developed.
“At least 207,468 minors married in the US between 2000 and 2015, according to data compiled by Unchained At Last, a group campaigning to abolish child marriage, and investigative documentary series Frontline,” The Independent reports.
Indeed, exemptions from the national marriage minimum age of 18 exist for circumstances like pregnancy and parental consent — in every state in the country.
Most states allowing adults to take a child spouse require the consent of one or both parents, permission from a judge, or some combination thereof — however, there is a rather astonishing footnote to this underbelly of marriage and child love in the United States.
As Frontline noted in a special report,
“In 26 states, there’s no minimum marriage age, according to the Tahirih Justice Center. Children in those states can get married at any age if certain conditions are met.”
I am not sure if I trust judges to make the right decision.
We have a Supreme Court judge who recommended lowering the age of consent to 12 years old.
Might be best to legislate some clear bright lines.
ozphil? Well, in figurative words, it is one thing to enable demonic entities like Phillip Garrido and Ariel Castro to do their evil deeds. It is a completely different thing to allow for judges to weed the good apples out from the bad apples. The marriage laws on the books pertaining to adolescent minors are supposed to do just that. Making the same mistake that Holland did of mirroring their minimum marriageable age (21 years old at the time) to their age of consent (21 years old at the time) so many decades ago is a recipe for disaster.
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
Wow! thanks for the update. The underlying culture of pedophilia is becoming more obvious, no?
airshipidea? But the problem I'm having with the above article is that too many people are misinterpreting what pedophilia is. Yes, I agree that kids should not be getting married at 10 years old, but the English Common Law also agrees with me in that regard. It is no secret that the American people are not tolerant to teenage girls of middle school or high school age straying outside their own age circles to find romance. However, even though Dr. Ben Carson's parents didn't have a marriage made in heaven, even Dr. Ben Carson would be very appalled if someone were to imply that his father was a pedophile. Proponents of this SB 48 are seeking to mirror the minimum marriageable age to the ages of consent in every state. Such a course of action was tried in the Netherlands so many decades ago. That is, before 1990, the age of consent in Holland was 21 years old and the law there made it virtually impossible for anyone to wed before the age of 21. These laws failed in Holland. They are going to fail terribly in the United States of America if they are ratified in every state. In a few short words, if SB 48 and similar laws pass all over the nation, there will be more people needlessly in prison, on the sex offender registries and on welfare. How can anyone call that good?
"As it stands, currently in Kentucky, teens under 18 can marry adults at ages 16 and 17 with the permission of their parents."
In many states the age of consent for sex is 16 so why shouldn't they be allowed to get married? They can drive and possess a shotgun at 16 in a lot of states too.
funbobby51? I just gave your comment a thumbs-up. :-) Also, in support of your argument, it seems outrageous to me that someone is automatically tried as an adult at the age of 16 years old in New York if they are charged with a crime, but they are not allowed to get married legally until they are 17 years old. Talk about one major double standard in the law. That one really takes the cake.
In New Hampshire you can get married at 13.
In New Hampshire, the minimum marriageable age through the proper legal channels is 13 years old for girls and 14 years old for boys. Unfortunately, there have been some people up there stirring up trouble and trying to change these laws to what they now are in Florida and Texas. Luckily, the state legislators in New Hampshire aren't budging. After I got my first big job in the city, I met this one woman in my office who told me that when her parents got married, her mother was 13 years old and her father was in his twenties. She had no complaints about her parents. In fact, she told me that they continued to be happily married after so many years. I've known of many scenarios like this one.
Considering some of the crap I've seen judges do, I'd rather a definitive line be drawn in the form of "hell the fuck no you can't marry a child dipshit", it can be called "NO, children aren't for sex you sick pedo act".
Admittedly, if a two 16 year olds want to marry, eh, maybe, depends. Or an 18 year old and a 16 year old, but younger or a wider age gap? I call no.
But see, outtheshellvlog, here is the problem I am having with your post. You're assuming that every young man over 18 years of age who has ever fallen in love with an adolescent girl under 18 years old and has married her is a pedophile, and nothing could be any further from the truth. A former co-worker of mine named Beatriz once told me that when her parents had gotten married, her mother was 14 years old and her father was 26 years old. She added that her parents had been happily married for over four decades. Somehow I just don't see Beatriz's father going to a pedophile pride parade in New York City if one should ever someday exist. Our nation is becoming too permissive towards deadbeat teenage fathers under 18 years old, and, at the same time, not only are extremists like Fraidy Freiss and Jeanne Smoot wrongfully condemning all Loretta-Lynn-style marriages as legalized acts of child rape but they are also trying to brainwash our society into believing that adult men are the cause of all adolescent girls' problems when, in fact, it is teenage boys that have the most access to them and the most opportunity to wreak havoc in their lives. I know that you're going to have your opinions and I'm going to have mine, but at least try to think outside the box just this one time and you'll find that this issue is not as black and white as these extremists make it appear to be.
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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.