Does Your State Allow Child Marriage?

The world gets stranger every single day, or it may be that my awareness of the craziness increases. I was amazed this evening to read an article about child marriage written by Suzanne Bowdey and published in The Daily Signal.

If you think child brides are the stuff of faraway cultures, think again. In 2017, child marriage was legal in all 50 states in America.

Only recently have survivors started chipping away at the practice, using their nightmarish stories to put a stop to the abuse of (mostly) young girls. California was next in line to outlaw the horror, until a shocking number of national groups swooped in to keep the under-18 unions legal.

Who are they and how can they justify their crusade? Answer: social extremists with one goal – protecting teenage abortion and transgenderism.

Bowdey told the story of a woman named Carol, who was only twelve years old when she became “engaged” to a man who was eighteen years old. He raped her “two and three times a week” for two years before he suspected that she was pregnant and took her to a doctor. The day after the pregnancy was confirmed, they were married to keep him out of jail. “Her new husband ordered her to quit school, sparking a five-year cycle of sexual abuse where she lived in a maggot-infested house with two babies and no electricity.”

Four decades, three husbands, and six children later, Carol is still traumatized [but married] to a good man for more than 30 years….

Horror stories like Carol’s are astonishingly common. More than 300,000 children under age 18 were legally married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018. Delaware and New Jersey were the first to take on the crisis – a crisis most Americans had no idea existed.

After nine states did away with marriages for minors, pressure started ramping up in other states to end the predatory practice this year, including blue states such as California.

To everyone’s shock, the Left’s big guns started coming out of the woodwork, vehemently opposing the bills to end child marriage, which is considered a human rights violation even by the liberal United Nations….

While survivors in wedding dresses and chains marched through Sacramento to protest current law, groups such as Planned Parenthood, Children’s Law Center, and the ACLU are fighting to keep young girls shackled. According to Newsweek, the groups are worried that putting an age limit on marriage would somehow spill over to ban abortions or gender transitions.

Jonathan Keller, president of California Family Council, says he wishes it were a joke. It isn’t. On “Washington Watch” on Friday, he called it absolutely “tragic” to see how extreme the Left has become. The idea that Planned Parenthood and other such groups would lobby to keep girls locked in legal relationships with (in many cases) sadistic abusers, should be a bridge too far even for them.

But then, that’s the business model: early sex, more abortions. Whether or not it’s consensual matters little to the industry’s profit sharks.