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.

Disorder or Reality?

            Is transgenderism a reality or a disorder? Is it possible for a man to become a woman simply because he thinks that he is a woman? Is it possible for a short person to become tall by thinking they are tall? Is it possible for a white person to become colored – or a colored person to become white – simply by thinking? This author believe that transgenderism is a disorder and that all of the other questions should be answered with a firm “NO!”

            Daniel Trotta reports that a transgender woman – a man who wants to be a woman - recently won the right to sue her employer under the Americans with Disabilities Act – an act that excludes transgender people from protection. Kate Lynn Blatt is the first transgender person allowed to sue under this act. She is suing Cabela’s Inc., her former employer, for sex discrimination, claiming that she was denied the right to use the women’s restroom and forced her to use her male name on her name tag temporarily. Cabela’s says that she was fired because of a threat to a co-worker’s child.

            According to Trotta, the American Psychiatric Association does not consider being transgender to be a disorder even though it can lead to “gender dysphoria, a type of anxiety that may require medical treatment.” The basis of Blatt’s claim is gender dysphoria. U.S. District Judge Joseph Leeson “avoided ruling on the constitutionality of the ADA,” but he “found that simply being transgender would be insufficient to bring a case.” If being transgender became gender dysphoria, it would be “a medical condition worthy of protection against discrimination.”

            Almost two years ago Dr. Paul McHugh published an article titled Transgenderism: A Pathogenic Meme.” He says that he studied people who claim to be transgender for 40 years as the Psychiatrist in Chief of Johns Hopkins Hospital and as the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School. He says that transgenderism began as a rare issue but has become common in the past 10-15 years.

The champions of this meme, encouraged by their alliance with the broader LGBT movement, claim that whether you are a man or a woman, a boy or a girl is more of a disposition or feeling about yourself than a fact of nature. And, much like any other feeling, it can change at any time, and for all sorts of reasons. Therefore, no one could predict who would swap this fact of their makeup, nor could one justifiably criticize such a decision.

At Johns Hopkins, after pioneering sex-change surgery, we demonstrated that the practice brought no important benefits. As a result, we stopped offering that form of treatment in the 1970s. Our efforts, though, had little influence on the emergence of this new is idea about sex, or upon the expansion of the number of “transgendered” among young and old.

            Dr. McHugh says that sex changes “brought no important benefits” and should be stopped. He believes that gender dysphoria should be treated in much the same way that anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder are treated. He says that “treatment should not be directed at the body as with surgery and hormones [but] should strive to correct the false, problematic nature of the assumption and to resolve the psychosocial conflicts provoking it.”

The larger issue is the meme itself. The idea that one’s sex is fluid and a matter open to choice runs unquestioned through our culture and is reflected everywhere in the media, the theater, the classroom, and in many medical clinics. It has taken on cult-like features: its own special lingo, internet chat rooms providing slick answers to new recruits, and clubs for easy access to dresses and styles supporting the sex change. It is doing much damage to families, adolescents, and children and should be confronted as an opinion without biological foundation wherever it emerges.

            This author believes that transgenderism is a mental disorder that should be treated in a similar manner as any other psychological illness. This also believes that those people who promote transgenderism are doing a great disservice to individuals and society as a whole.

            Dr. Barry Starr at Stanford University claims that nothing can change a male to a female or vice versa and that the sex of individuals is determined at conception.

No amount of surgery, hormone injections or anything else will change someone’s DNA from a man’s to a woman’s (or vice versa).

As you know, for humans, sex is determined by the presence of a Y chromosome – humans with an X and a Y chromosome are male and those with two X chromosomes are female. No current (or probably future) technology can replace a chromosome in all of our trillions of cells.

In fact, it probably wouldn’t matter if they did. The genes on the Y chromosome sort of get the ball rolling for becoming a male. Once that has happened, the system can go on indefinitely….

So as you can see, with a sex change operation the underlying DNA stays whatever sex they started out with. The hormone injections, though, cause a different set of genes on the DNA to be turned on so that you get, for example, a male pattern of gene expression in someone who is XX.

            Sex is determined by the X chromosome, so sex cannot be changed without changing every chromosome in each cell of the body. Therefore, sex surgery and hormone injections may change how a person looks and acts, but it does not change the actual sex of the individual. This means that Dr. McHugh is correct in his assertion.

Transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men. All … become feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they “identify.” In that lies their problematic future.

            The comments by Dr. McHugh and Dr. Starr explain why so many transgender people remain unhappy with their lives. They think that they are the opposite sex and do everything in their power to become that sex. Yet, when everything is said and done, they are the same sex with the hormones of the opposite sex raging through their bodies. This author believes that transgenderism is a mental disorder rather than a reality and should receive appropriate treatment without attempting to change the sex of the individual.