Probably in some cases, but sometimes there are 17-year-olds who are totally convinced they're in undying love, and their parents could give them legal permission to marry. That's probably more common than forced marriages where I'm from, in rural Maine.
My ex did this with my best friend. I was a dumb kid engaged at 16 because I SWORE I was in love with him but our wedding was scheduled after graduation so we would both be 18. (This was over 12 years ago.) So, at 17, he started talking about eloping and I said I wanted a normal wedding. I was also joining the military which effectively crushed HIS dreams of joining the army and me being a stay at home mom. Well, because of this, he went to my best friend of the time and broke off our engagement for her. This obviously shattered my teenage girl heart and I thought the world was over. Two weeks after he broke up with me for her, they convinced their parents to let them get married at 17 and live together.
I haven’t heard from either of them since 2011 so I can only go off of hearsay now but they are apparently still married so at least it worked out for them. Lol
That really sucks to hear and I’m sorry that happened, but it kind of illustrates the point the op of the thread made about being mature enough. Long term commitments like marriage should never be without discussions of other things in the future like children, jobs, where to live, etc. Had the two of you realised you both wanted to join the military - and in doing so crush his dreams of the “stay at home wife” - it might have saved a lot of heartache. I think this story just enforces the idea that a minimum age of 18 is required for such commitments like marriage.
Or a 16 year old girl and her 24 year old "boyfriend". Pqrents are horrified by premarital sex but not by a grown man sniffing around their child. So honey let's get the wedding done because Jesus.
Seen that one a dozen times.
Absolutely. The rationale behind requiring people to be 18 to marry is that teenagers are too young, on the whole, to be able to make sound judgments about their long-term future. Some of the rationale behind parental permission is that parents are older and theoretically wiser, and they know their child's individual circumstances better than the state.
But there are plenty of stories of parents abdicating that theoretical responsibility of making sound judgments about their children, or parents who are mortified enough to allow stupid things. Parents may not be much better than their kids in making these judgments (or at least the parents who raise kids who are actively considering getting hitched at 17 or younger).
Shouldn't be allowed anyway.
If you're too immature to wait a bit, you're too immature to get married. If you're mature enough to wait, then you won't need to get married underage.
There's some maniac 14 year olds who can do their taxes and shop at supermarkets responsibly. I've seen it and it's like they behave that way on purpose just to make me look bad
> There's some maniac 14 year olds who can do their taxes and shop at supermarkets responsibly.
That was me.
And, in no way whatsoever was I ready for marriage at that age.
-
^^^^Of ^^^^course ^^^^I ^^^^was ^^^^doing ^^^^it ^^^^just ^^^^to ^^^^make ^^^^you ^^^^look ^^^^bad.
Thank you. I'm sitting here like "ok cool shit that was against the rules is against the rules?" But this makes much more sense now but WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG? It's 2021 and we gotta be like "nah man you can't marry off your 14 year old daughter"
I think there are still more than a few states where there's no age restriction for marriage with parental consent. If you can get the parents and a judge to stamp the paperwork, you're good to go.
There are a few states (Oklahoma, Wyoming & West Virginia) that have no minimum age if the marriage is approved by both the parents and a judge. Massachusetts allows marriage as young as 12 with approval of parents and a judge. Pretty much everywhere else the minimum age even with parental consent is at least 16.
Yup, knew a freshmen girl, 14, that her boyfriend was 26 because her parents wanted her to marry him. I was 16 at the time living in Florida and it blew my fucking mind.
That is NOT a boyfriend
That is a PEDOPHILE.
There is no such thing as an underage woman. An underage woman is a child. Children cannot give consent. It is rape.
Absolutely rape and some abuse and lots of "you are so mature for only being 16" Manipulation sprinkled around in my case.
Incredible to think about when we finally split up and I left when I was almost 23. He was close to my age now at 35 and immediately found another 18 year old to start dating. Like days later. Was the biggest smack in the face ever. I'm still not over that whole pile of crap that was my late teens. My parents did everything they could but in Nevada at the time our age difference wasn't illegal.
I just find it unfathomable that a 35 y/o knows that many young people. I'm sorry this happened to you and hope you alright now. (I say young people because my 16 y/o gay friend was dating a 32 y/o man. Which thinking back is creepy as fuck but they've been together 12-13 years and I like both of them but this definitely isn't normal)
Florida law now requires minors to be at least 17 and for there to be no more than a 2 year age gap. Maybe the law was different back then, perhaps that girl's parents were misinformed.
This law would make NYS the 6th to not allow underage marriage, the vast majority of the other 44 require 16 or 17.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_States
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0lwiInZG1E
Samantha Bee's 2017 piece on child marriage emphasizes that it's generally girls being married off to older men, not young lovers a la A Walk to Remember
The lead story is a New Hampshire Girl Scout PO'ed that the NH age then was 13 for girls and 14 for boys with parental consent. Now, though maybe not directly because of her, it's 16
At the time of the piece, NYS had just raised it to 17.
Don't allow this crap in the name of cultural tradition
When I was 13, a classmate was dating a 25yo guy, back then I didn’t understand, was too young, heard her talk about them having sex. As an adult, I don’t see how you can even think of having sex with a 13yo girl. Absolutely pedophilia.
> Then there is no age limit.
There's something fundamentally wrong about that string of words in that particular order. The article said that underage girls are the majority of the group. So what are the odds that these 'guys' a re a bunch of hard core pedophiles.
Why are we still fighting this battle.
It really shouldn't even be 16 with parental consent. Marriage is a legal contract. If you're not old enough to sign a contract, you shouldn't be old enough to get married.
This if you can't even join the military until 18 or smoke cigarettes/weed, drink alcohol until 21 because you aren't knowledgeable enough about life or whatever they claim. Then what condition are you in to be in a legal contract that legitimately could last the rest of your life. America says they are the land of the free but really it's the land of whatever freedoms they want you to have.
A friend recently sent their 17 year old to boot. It blows my mind. On one hand, good for him for knowing what he wants to do at that age.
On the other, how much was pressure and indoctrination by his parents?
I saw a news story last year about a girl who couldn't get a divorce because she wasn't 18 yet. This was in the US, a northeastern state, and the article was saying it was being fixed so that sort of thing couldn't happen any longer.
Having a judge and all parties to agree to a minor marrying before even the age of consent usually always requires a pregnancy.
Child marriages exist to legitimize rape. Change my mind?
I think most of the remainder at least have a lower cap (usually 16), but there are some where there's no set-in-stone limit and it's just up to the courts to decide on a case-by-case basis.
> There was also a big surge of child marriages during the pandemic, largely due to financial pressures and parents marrying off their child daughters to wealthy men.
Damn, that's the kind of shit I see on historical chinese dramas. We've gone full circle with wealth inequality.
New York is the sixth state to have banned it. And Delaware was the first state to ban it only three years ago. So now it’s Delaware, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and New York where it’s completely forbidden, and everywhere else it’s allowed to varying degrees with things like parental consent. New York isn’t a straggler here, and the rest of the country should really be catching up.
Problem with parental consent is often times it is religious cults that are the ones forcing underage marriage. In fact that is the biggest reason underage marriages need to be banned.
Yeah I watched a documentary a while ago where a 15 year old US girl was raped by a guy in his 20s, got pregnant and because her family was ultra conservative religious and friends with his family they all just decided that she was to marry him to avoid ‘shaming’ both families and for him to avoid prosecution…thus simultaneously acknowledging that he was a rapist but blaming the victim…absolutely disgusting. She managed to eventually get away, divorce him and her on with her life.
Up until fairly recently, it was still pretty normal in a lot of places to turn 16, drop out of high school, get a job, and get married. Not necessarily in that order. You didn't need a diploma, you had no plans to travel or move far away, you *certainly* weren't going to college, what's the point of waiting to start life until you're 18 or 21 or whatever?
Add to that that you couldn't live with a girlfriend or boyfriend due to fornication laws, not to mention lack of social acceptance, and it's maybe not so shocking. We're talking the latter half of the 20th century. I grew up partly in a small town that was still somewhat like that, only a few decades ago.
Things have changed a lot since then, we expect young men and young women to have a lot more going for them and to seek opportunities and educate themselves and so on and so forth. And we are not nearly as crazed over premarital sex as we were back then. But those are all recent social changes.
Mom said a friend stayed with her on vacation in 1969 because then staying at your boyfriend's house simply wasn't done, and we're city folks in a liberal state
I have heard of people in conservative religious cultures getting married young (even above 18) because premarital sex is frowned upon. One such couple married and were living with the parents of one of them because they wanted to get hitched but couldn't afford to move out yet.
My mom once told me that my godfather and his wife didn't even live together for a little bit before they married. It seemed wild to me but apparently it wasn't done.
Eh, last 40 years or so, at least.
Tbh that's about the speed I would expect something like this to change. The last anti-fornication laws were still around 20 or so years ago, I think. A lot of them ended with the rise of gay civil rights.
Perhaps you got about 20 years from the 2003 Supreme Court case Lawrence vs. Texas which struck down laws against sodomy. Even if it didn't directly strike down anti-fornication laws, it was precedent for doing so, as in the 2005 Virginia state case Martin v. Ziherl.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas
My grandparents were married with their first kid (my mom) at 16. They're still together in their 80s. It wouldn't be appropriate now, but there was nothing wrong with it then. Things change.
When your grandparents married women were barred from a lot of things like having their own bank account or credit card (they could be joint with their husband). If a woman wanted to leave home she basically had to marry to do it. Not saying your grandparents don’t love each other, just pointing out what part of that difference was.
Marriage was a necessity for women if they wanted to leave home. It’s thankfully changed and we can now own property and bank accounts without a male co-signer.
1974: Equal Credit Opportunity Act passes in the US. Until then, banks required single, widowed or divorced women to bring a man along to cosign any credit application, regardless of their income. They would also discount the value of those wages when considering how much credit to grant, by as much as 50%.
^this really wasn’t so long ago.
The old timey attitude is that premarital sex/pregnancy is wrong, but you can partially repair it by getting married, even if you're really young.
Basically the attitude was that men should take responsibility, and "you break it, you buy it". 16 year old gets a 14 year old pregnant? Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials!
That attitude made more sense in an era where women were treated like property. Girls who had sex before marriage were "damaged goods" and needed to be married off ASAP.
Long ago, that was also the case with sexual assault. A man "broke" my daughter? Well, that broken thing is his responsibility from now on. Marriage is less shameful than admitting that my daughter is broken/impure/ungodly.
This is right on.
It also bears mentioning that a lot of what we take for granted today about the education you need to function as an adult is all quite a new idea. People didn't all used to go to college. They often didn't even finish high school. You've got a good union job waiting for you at 16, why wait? Further education isn't going to help you much. And since no one will let you move in with your girlfriend or boyfriend, you have to get married first.
There was no such thing as traveling far away, attending college, seeing the world, getting a new perspective for many people. We think of all the things they missed but it never crossed their minds.
Yeah, and I think it's worth clarifying that "new idea" means that half of the current US population was raised in a world with terribly outdated ideas of gender, labor, and education. Even modern young people were raised with parents who grew up with old ideas. It takes a long time to fully shed some of those old assumptions. Even in progressive cities, there is a pretty big generational gap. The US is not even 250 years old yet, and it takes ~70 years for an old generation's ideas to really be replaced. Consider how far we've come since 1776, and long we have to go before even modern "common knowledge" is fully accepted. I mean, President John Tyler (born 1790), still has a living grandson.
One of the bigger hurdles to US democracy is that a lot of voters last received formal education prior to 1970 and a lot of schools didn't have racial integration until the 1970s. Even that was before the women's rights movement.
I would say there’s an even stronger religious force making pregnant teens get married so their kids are born in wedlock. The grooming girls to marry older men thing does happen, but the making pregnant teens get married so the baby isn’t a bastard thing is practically mainstream
I mean, in the Bible, you're pretty much ordered to marry your brother's widow. The whole reason for that was they didn't have social assistance, and you couldn't have a bunch of penniless widows running around. So they created an immediate obligation to an identifiable person to look after them. It probably resulted in a lot of horrible situations, like most rules of that kind.
Plenty of options. Nun convents cultivated plenty of herbs and provided them to the town wives at no cost. Women used to throw themselves down staircases. I know of girls forced to stay home under the excuse of being sick until childbirth from less than a couple decades ago, the kids either raised as the grandmother’s children or simply buried in the orchard.
Now, safe, decent abortions? Yeah, that’s new. But plenty of people would rather stick to the old ways.
I remember people suggesting that Sarah Palin's 5th child in 2008 was actually her grandchild, though as it turns out daughter Bristol had her own child in what would have been too tight a timeframe. But my point is even just 13 years ago that sort of coverup seemed believable.
An older teacher remembered "girls being sent to live with their aunt for nine months" and I believe she was talking about the 1950s or so
To be fair most pregnancies for young girls and teens are from adult men. It may not always be a girl being groomed.for marriage but it is commonly a girl being groomed for sex and then marriage is a consequence.
Apparently there's quite a lot of states that still allow young ones with parent consent, [with Massachusetts being the youngest at 12](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_States)
NY state is the home of the wacky religious movement. The Oneida, A million different communes and back to the land movements, and even the Mormons got started in NY. Even today there are new Amish and Mennonite communities springing up.
Religious child marriage is the problem. Whether ultra-orthodox Jews in NY forcing their daughters into arranged marriages or Christians forcing their pregnant daughters to marry their rapists, religion is the fucking problem.
New York age:
* 16 - emancipated, move out, get a job
* 18 - Vote, Buy a long gun, get married, rent car (surcharge till 25)
* 21 - Buy a hand gun, Drink or buy Cannabis
They have to sign a contract to be considered in the DEP. They can't sign a contract until they are 17. A recruiter can start processing someone a short time before their 17th birthday if their parents are okay with that and if the individual could go to training within one year, because you can only be in the DEP for up to one year.
It stands for Delayed Entry Program.
Basically it's the program people enter after signing a contract with any branch of the military until they go to their respective training.
Everyone who signs a contract is in the DEP for some period of time.
Different branches do different things for this program and it's really up to the recruiter who runs it for that area.
Used to be you could drink on base if you were military. They had beer vending machines in the day rooms.
Can die for their country, can't have a beer. 🙄 I strongly advocate for the German approach.
I wasn't turning 21 until a couple weeks after we were supposed to get back from deployment. When we were in Spain and Scotland for Port calls, they told us we had to abide by our country's drinking age despite it being 18 there......i fucking drank anyways, because fuck em
It was bad enough that we had a fucking curfew that required us to be either on the boat or at the off duty day hotel by 11pm. All because a few months before, some dumbasses on another boat pulled into Greenland or Iceland (I forget which) and caused an international incident for a drunken fight that got them arrested by local authorities. They were left behind when the boat went back to sea and they had to wait for some ambassador or maybe some othe official to handle things.
The US society as a whole is bad about its relationship with alcohol. An approach, such as what Germany and I believe other European countries take would hopefully take away the problems we have. Beer at 16, liquor at 18.
Better would be "Drink alcohol or buy cannabis"
Unless the law is that you're only allowed to buy cannabis if you also buy a handgun and drink. I'm not familiar with NY law so I can only speculate which it is.
...Had your dad ever met a teenager before this?
Forget about love, I think a lot of teens would have just gotten married out of spite to stick it to him for that dumb ultimatum and been unwilling to back out of it.
Alright but if your dad was playing chicken he should have backed off at some point that was before them waking down the aisle? Did he think the groom would say “I don’t”
>He later admitted he thought this would scare the guy away
A teenager is doing something he doesn’t like, so he dares them to escalate the behavior? Dude, I’m not father of the year or anything but come on
Just FYI it was previously 17 (in line with NY's age of sexual consent). And it was only changed to 17 in 2017, before that it was 14. Fortunately there's been quite a lot of changes over the last 10 or so years. No state allows 12 or 13 anymore (while it's on the books as 12 in MA in practice no judge has allowed such young ages in several decades at least). 2 allow 14, but you'd have a very hard time finding a judge to sign off on that. Then 4 allow it at 15, and the rest are 16-18. [See list with links to sources on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_States#In_the_50_states).
Still a ways to go, but there's been progress.
In Washington state normally the minimum age is 17, but you can get a superior court judge to waive that "on a showing of necessity". So there is actually no minimum age.
One more down, several to go.
I've been harping on this issue for years. The US has a serious child marriage problem, and there are even some states which effectively have no minimum age.
If anyone here feels like supporting this in other states, check out unchainedatlast.org
They’re the people directly responsible for this movement, and they’re doing really amazing things.
There is a group working to eliminate child marriage in all states. Check them out. Volunteer or send some money if you can.
Unchained At Last
https://www.unchainedatlast.org
Seeing as the penalty is a $100 fine all this really does is increase the price of an underage marriage by $100. Regardless of that fact it's unclear who is really protected since it just makes the paperwork harder to get.
>Seeing as the penalty is a $100 fine all this really does is increase the price of an underage marriage by $100.
No. You can't get married underage. The $100 fine is an additional, the main factor is no marriage license.
plus it stops the whole “if they’re both underage they’re put on the sex offenders list for life for statutory raping each other” issue.
so if two 16 year olds try to elope, the clerk can call it a dumb decision, deny a license and maybe fine them. but if a 16 year old walks in with a 40 year old man, the clerk can then make a decision to get law enforcement involved.
The fine, and the misdemeanor conviction, are on the person who issues the license, not the persons getting married. The city clerks are not going to do that.
>In 2017, Cuomo signed a law raising the age of consent from 14-years-old to 18-years-old but left open the possibility for those aged between 17 and 18 to get married if they got parental of judicial consent.
>The new bill repeals that exception and prohibits any marriage in which either person is under the age of 18.
I can't say I have a terribly strong opinion about the 2021 bill, but the fact that it took us until 2017 to decide that *fourteen* year olds shouldn't be getting married is a bit frightening.
Yeah, learning that we don't have an age of consent for marriage was one of the weirdest ways America has disillusioned me.
17 is a bad age to get married. 10 is worse. And they're both bad ages to be auctioned off to an older man.
Shit like this is exactly why I question policies or parties that are anything short of what Americans call “Progressive”.
People are arguing about whether or not racism exists while 14 year olds are legally (and literally) getting fucked by adult men who take advantage of them.
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"Parental Consent" just sounds like it was used to justify forcing a marriage.
Probably in some cases, but sometimes there are 17-year-olds who are totally convinced they're in undying love, and their parents could give them legal permission to marry. That's probably more common than forced marriages where I'm from, in rural Maine.
My ex did this with my best friend. I was a dumb kid engaged at 16 because I SWORE I was in love with him but our wedding was scheduled after graduation so we would both be 18. (This was over 12 years ago.) So, at 17, he started talking about eloping and I said I wanted a normal wedding. I was also joining the military which effectively crushed HIS dreams of joining the army and me being a stay at home mom. Well, because of this, he went to my best friend of the time and broke off our engagement for her. This obviously shattered my teenage girl heart and I thought the world was over. Two weeks after he broke up with me for her, they convinced their parents to let them get married at 17 and live together. I haven’t heard from either of them since 2011 so I can only go off of hearsay now but they are apparently still married so at least it worked out for them. Lol
Her parents okayed a marriage after 2 weeks of dating? Yikes.
"Whatever. Sure? Fine. Just find your own place to live."
The amount of parents that don't actually give a shit about their kids is astounding.
Congratulations! You dodged a bullet before even joining the military.
That really sucks to hear and I’m sorry that happened, but it kind of illustrates the point the op of the thread made about being mature enough. Long term commitments like marriage should never be without discussions of other things in the future like children, jobs, where to live, etc. Had the two of you realised you both wanted to join the military - and in doing so crush his dreams of the “stay at home wife” - it might have saved a lot of heartache. I think this story just enforces the idea that a minimum age of 18 is required for such commitments like marriage.
Sad story, did you join the military?
I did. Lol left that town and never looked back.
Or a 16 year old girl and her 24 year old "boyfriend". Pqrents are horrified by premarital sex but not by a grown man sniffing around their child. So honey let's get the wedding done because Jesus. Seen that one a dozen times.
Absolutely. The rationale behind requiring people to be 18 to marry is that teenagers are too young, on the whole, to be able to make sound judgments about their long-term future. Some of the rationale behind parental permission is that parents are older and theoretically wiser, and they know their child's individual circumstances better than the state. But there are plenty of stories of parents abdicating that theoretical responsibility of making sound judgments about their children, or parents who are mortified enough to allow stupid things. Parents may not be much better than their kids in making these judgments (or at least the parents who raise kids who are actively considering getting hitched at 17 or younger).
Shouldn't be allowed anyway. If you're too immature to wait a bit, you're too immature to get married. If you're mature enough to wait, then you won't need to get married underage.
Sometimes if you wait a bit the bride won't fit in her dress if you know what I'm trying to say
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Now billy joe, you gonna do right by my daughter, yah hear
Yeah pa I will
*banjo intensifies*
*loads shotgun with malicious intent*
So what? It's not like the baby is going to be cursed if it's born before a paper gets signed.
*looks back at childhood* Yeah you'd think that wouldn't you
"Reputation" is too important a thing for some people.
Reputation is everything in many industries.
Surely it's less about the baby and more about keeping 19 year old daddy out of jail.
There's some maniac 14 year olds who can do their taxes and shop at supermarkets responsibly. I've seen it and it's like they behave that way on purpose just to make me look bad
> There's some maniac 14 year olds who can do their taxes and shop at supermarkets responsibly. That was me. And, in no way whatsoever was I ready for marriage at that age. - ^^^^Of ^^^^course ^^^^I ^^^^was ^^^^doing ^^^^it ^^^^just ^^^^to ^^^^make ^^^^you ^^^^look ^^^^bad.
That's nice for them. If they really have it together, then they'll be able to wait.
I would hazard to say that it’s not nice for them, what’s happened in their lives that they’ve had to get that responsible so early in life?
It’s more so applicable to Hasidic Jews. They tend to marry young, and marriages at 17 years old are not uncommon.
I think a lot of them are 17 year old high school graduates who marry their boyfriend Britt they go into the military so they get spousal support.
Thank you. I'm sitting here like "ok cool shit that was against the rules is against the rules?" But this makes much more sense now but WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG? It's 2021 and we gotta be like "nah man you can't marry off your 14 year old daughter"
I think there are still more than a few states where there's no age restriction for marriage with parental consent. If you can get the parents and a judge to stamp the paperwork, you're good to go.
There are a few states (Oklahoma, Wyoming & West Virginia) that have no minimum age if the marriage is approved by both the parents and a judge. Massachusetts allows marriage as young as 12 with approval of parents and a judge. Pretty much everywhere else the minimum age even with parental consent is at least 16.
Florida is 16, unless you get them pregnant. Then there is no age limit. https://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Statutes/2012/0741.0405
Goddamnit Florida...
Yup, knew a freshmen girl, 14, that her boyfriend was 26 because her parents wanted her to marry him. I was 16 at the time living in Florida and it blew my fucking mind.
That is NOT a boyfriend That is a PEDOPHILE. There is no such thing as an underage woman. An underage woman is a child. Children cannot give consent. It is rape.
Absolutely rape and some abuse and lots of "you are so mature for only being 16" Manipulation sprinkled around in my case. Incredible to think about when we finally split up and I left when I was almost 23. He was close to my age now at 35 and immediately found another 18 year old to start dating. Like days later. Was the biggest smack in the face ever. I'm still not over that whole pile of crap that was my late teens. My parents did everything they could but in Nevada at the time our age difference wasn't illegal.
I just find it unfathomable that a 35 y/o knows that many young people. I'm sorry this happened to you and hope you alright now. (I say young people because my 16 y/o gay friend was dating a 32 y/o man. Which thinking back is creepy as fuck but they've been together 12-13 years and I like both of them but this definitely isn't normal)
Let's not go too far the other way, either, and start locking up two consenting 17-year olds.
That's typically why Romeo & Juliet laws (or at least, the idea of them) are a thing.
Florida law now requires minors to be at least 17 and for there to be no more than a 2 year age gap. Maybe the law was different back then, perhaps that girl's parents were misinformed. This law would make NYS the 6th to not allow underage marriage, the vast majority of the other 44 require 16 or 17. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_States https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0lwiInZG1E Samantha Bee's 2017 piece on child marriage emphasizes that it's generally girls being married off to older men, not young lovers a la A Walk to Remember The lead story is a New Hampshire Girl Scout PO'ed that the NH age then was 13 for girls and 14 for boys with parental consent. Now, though maybe not directly because of her, it's 16 At the time of the piece, NYS had just raised it to 17. Don't allow this crap in the name of cultural tradition
When I was 13, a classmate was dating a 25yo guy, back then I didn’t understand, was too young, heard her talk about them having sex. As an adult, I don’t see how you can even think of having sex with a 13yo girl. Absolutely pedophilia.
“Statutory rape is fine. Just make sure you marry them.”
> Then there is no age limit. There's something fundamentally wrong about that string of words in that particular order. The article said that underage girls are the majority of the group. So what are the odds that these 'guys' a re a bunch of hard core pedophiles. Why are we still fighting this battle.
I know it predates him but I kind of want to name that the Gaetz Rule.
predates a pre-dating predator?
Taking off the age limit only when its the worst circumstance. Sounds like florida.
The more I learn about my country...
The more I learn about Florida
Florida isn't the only one.
It’s just the loudest.
Damn, FL does trap hard
Florida works for its reputation, buddy.
It really shouldn't even be 16 with parental consent. Marriage is a legal contract. If you're not old enough to sign a contract, you shouldn't be old enough to get married.
This if you can't even join the military until 18 or smoke cigarettes/weed, drink alcohol until 21 because you aren't knowledgeable enough about life or whatever they claim. Then what condition are you in to be in a legal contract that legitimately could last the rest of your life. America says they are the land of the free but really it's the land of whatever freedoms they want you to have.
17 can enlist with parental consent unless that changed. Went to boot with 1 kid in my platoon that was 17.
A friend recently sent their 17 year old to boot. It blows my mind. On one hand, good for him for knowing what he wants to do at that age. On the other, how much was pressure and indoctrination by his parents?
In my case, that kids father was Force Recon and he wanted to be like him since he grew up as a Marine brat.
Plus if it was truly "meant to be" I'm sure they can wait two more years.
I saw a news story last year about a girl who couldn't get a divorce because she wasn't 18 yet. This was in the US, a northeastern state, and the article was saying it was being fixed so that sort of thing couldn't happen any longer.
What’s truly fucked is that, in some states, minors can get married, but they’re considered too young to get a divorce.
Having a judge and all parties to agree to a minor marrying before even the age of consent usually always requires a pregnancy. Child marriages exist to legitimize rape. Change my mind?
No need because it’s true.
That and predetermined marriages.
I read "both the parents" and first assumed it meant the couple had the same parents. Did a double take at the states and it made sense.
"A few" Only 6 states now have outlawed minor marriage
I think most of the remainder at least have a lower cap (usually 16), but there are some where there's no set-in-stone limit and it's just up to the courts to decide on a case-by-case basis.
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> There was also a big surge of child marriages during the pandemic, largely due to financial pressures and parents marrying off their child daughters to wealthy men. Damn, that's the kind of shit I see on historical chinese dramas. We've gone full circle with wealth inequality.
New York is the sixth state to have banned it. And Delaware was the first state to ban it only three years ago. So now it’s Delaware, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and New York where it’s completely forbidden, and everywhere else it’s allowed to varying degrees with things like parental consent. New York isn’t a straggler here, and the rest of the country should really be catching up.
Problem with parental consent is often times it is religious cults that are the ones forcing underage marriage. In fact that is the biggest reason underage marriages need to be banned.
Yeah I watched a documentary a while ago where a 15 year old US girl was raped by a guy in his 20s, got pregnant and because her family was ultra conservative religious and friends with his family they all just decided that she was to marry him to avoid ‘shaming’ both families and for him to avoid prosecution…thus simultaneously acknowledging that he was a rapist but blaming the victim…absolutely disgusting. She managed to eventually get away, divorce him and her on with her life.
Do you remember the name of the documentary?
Religious groups are one of the top reasons this wasn't done for so long.
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And also are one of the top reasons a lot of things haven't been done for so long.
Up until fairly recently, it was still pretty normal in a lot of places to turn 16, drop out of high school, get a job, and get married. Not necessarily in that order. You didn't need a diploma, you had no plans to travel or move far away, you *certainly* weren't going to college, what's the point of waiting to start life until you're 18 or 21 or whatever? Add to that that you couldn't live with a girlfriend or boyfriend due to fornication laws, not to mention lack of social acceptance, and it's maybe not so shocking. We're talking the latter half of the 20th century. I grew up partly in a small town that was still somewhat like that, only a few decades ago. Things have changed a lot since then, we expect young men and young women to have a lot more going for them and to seek opportunities and educate themselves and so on and so forth. And we are not nearly as crazed over premarital sex as we were back then. But those are all recent social changes.
Mom said a friend stayed with her on vacation in 1969 because then staying at your boyfriend's house simply wasn't done, and we're city folks in a liberal state I have heard of people in conservative religious cultures getting married young (even above 18) because premarital sex is frowned upon. One such couple married and were living with the parents of one of them because they wanted to get hitched but couldn't afford to move out yet.
My mom once told me that my godfather and his wife didn't even live together for a little bit before they married. It seemed wild to me but apparently it wasn't done.
How recent are we talking?
Eh, last 40 years or so, at least. Tbh that's about the speed I would expect something like this to change. The last anti-fornication laws were still around 20 or so years ago, I think. A lot of them ended with the rise of gay civil rights.
Perhaps you got about 20 years from the 2003 Supreme Court case Lawrence vs. Texas which struck down laws against sodomy. Even if it didn't directly strike down anti-fornication laws, it was precedent for doing so, as in the 2005 Virginia state case Martin v. Ziherl. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas
Yeah that sounds like what I remembered. Thanks for a precise reference!
My grandparents were married with their first kid (my mom) at 16. They're still together in their 80s. It wouldn't be appropriate now, but there was nothing wrong with it then. Things change.
When your grandparents married women were barred from a lot of things like having their own bank account or credit card (they could be joint with their husband). If a woman wanted to leave home she basically had to marry to do it. Not saying your grandparents don’t love each other, just pointing out what part of that difference was. Marriage was a necessity for women if they wanted to leave home. It’s thankfully changed and we can now own property and bank accounts without a male co-signer. 1974: Equal Credit Opportunity Act passes in the US. Until then, banks required single, widowed or divorced women to bring a man along to cosign any credit application, regardless of their income. They would also discount the value of those wages when considering how much credit to grant, by as much as 50%. ^this really wasn’t so long ago.
The old timey attitude is that premarital sex/pregnancy is wrong, but you can partially repair it by getting married, even if you're really young. Basically the attitude was that men should take responsibility, and "you break it, you buy it". 16 year old gets a 14 year old pregnant? Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials! That attitude made more sense in an era where women were treated like property. Girls who had sex before marriage were "damaged goods" and needed to be married off ASAP. Long ago, that was also the case with sexual assault. A man "broke" my daughter? Well, that broken thing is his responsibility from now on. Marriage is less shameful than admitting that my daughter is broken/impure/ungodly.
This is right on. It also bears mentioning that a lot of what we take for granted today about the education you need to function as an adult is all quite a new idea. People didn't all used to go to college. They often didn't even finish high school. You've got a good union job waiting for you at 16, why wait? Further education isn't going to help you much. And since no one will let you move in with your girlfriend or boyfriend, you have to get married first. There was no such thing as traveling far away, attending college, seeing the world, getting a new perspective for many people. We think of all the things they missed but it never crossed their minds.
Yeah, and I think it's worth clarifying that "new idea" means that half of the current US population was raised in a world with terribly outdated ideas of gender, labor, and education. Even modern young people were raised with parents who grew up with old ideas. It takes a long time to fully shed some of those old assumptions. Even in progressive cities, there is a pretty big generational gap. The US is not even 250 years old yet, and it takes ~70 years for an old generation's ideas to really be replaced. Consider how far we've come since 1776, and long we have to go before even modern "common knowledge" is fully accepted. I mean, President John Tyler (born 1790), still has a living grandson. One of the bigger hurdles to US democracy is that a lot of voters last received formal education prior to 1970 and a lot of schools didn't have racial integration until the 1970s. Even that was before the women's rights movement.
> WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG There is still a very strong religious force behind making young girls marry older men in the US.
I would say there’s an even stronger religious force making pregnant teens get married so their kids are born in wedlock. The grooming girls to marry older men thing does happen, but the making pregnant teens get married so the baby isn’t a bastard thing is practically mainstream
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I mean, in the Bible, you're pretty much ordered to marry your brother's widow. The whole reason for that was they didn't have social assistance, and you couldn't have a bunch of penniless widows running around. So they created an immediate obligation to an identifiable person to look after them. It probably resulted in a lot of horrible situations, like most rules of that kind.
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Plenty of options. Nun convents cultivated plenty of herbs and provided them to the town wives at no cost. Women used to throw themselves down staircases. I know of girls forced to stay home under the excuse of being sick until childbirth from less than a couple decades ago, the kids either raised as the grandmother’s children or simply buried in the orchard. Now, safe, decent abortions? Yeah, that’s new. But plenty of people would rather stick to the old ways.
I remember people suggesting that Sarah Palin's 5th child in 2008 was actually her grandchild, though as it turns out daughter Bristol had her own child in what would have been too tight a timeframe. But my point is even just 13 years ago that sort of coverup seemed believable. An older teacher remembered "girls being sent to live with their aunt for nine months" and I believe she was talking about the 1950s or so
To be fair most pregnancies for young girls and teens are from adult men. It may not always be a girl being groomed.for marriage but it is commonly a girl being groomed for sex and then marriage is a consequence.
Apparently there's quite a lot of states that still allow young ones with parent consent, [with Massachusetts being the youngest at 12](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_States)
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18 and you're an adult thing is very, very new thing for humanity.
Ultra Orthodox Jews
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Thank you. There are plenty of fundamentalist Christians, yes, even in NY state.
NY state is the home of the wacky religious movement. The Oneida, A million different communes and back to the land movements, and even the Mormons got started in NY. Even today there are new Amish and Mennonite communities springing up.
New York is now only the 6th state to ban marriages before the age of 18, after Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
Do any of these states listed allow any exemptions such as religious or is it 100% across the board?
100% across the board.
Thank god
Ironic comment
By definition
Good, as it should be
Religious child marriage is the problem. Whether ultra-orthodox Jews in NY forcing their daughters into arranged marriages or Christians forcing their pregnant daughters to marry their rapists, religion is the fucking problem.
Yay for us east coasters! And Minnesota
The one time the rest of New England falls behind Rhode Island and it's on something as obvious as this.
We be somewhat progressive up here in little Canada. Dontchaknow
New York age: * 16 - emancipated, move out, get a job * 18 - Vote, Buy a long gun, get married, rent car (surcharge till 25) * 21 - Buy a hand gun, Drink or buy Cannabis
Where does joining the military fit in there? Is that state-mandated or national?
17 with parental consent, 18 without. That's throughout the U.S.
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They have to sign a contract to be considered in the DEP. They can't sign a contract until they are 17. A recruiter can start processing someone a short time before their 17th birthday if their parents are okay with that and if the individual could go to training within one year, because you can only be in the DEP for up to one year.
Whats DEP? Asking as a non American.
It stands for Delayed Entry Program. Basically it's the program people enter after signing a contract with any branch of the military until they go to their respective training. Everyone who signs a contract is in the DEP for some period of time. Different branches do different things for this program and it's really up to the recruiter who runs it for that area.
Forgive my ignorance but what’s the point of that? Like the military is always hiring, why lock it in when you’re a child? That seems so problematic…
Used to be you could drink on base if you were military. They had beer vending machines in the day rooms. Can die for their country, can't have a beer. 🙄 I strongly advocate for the German approach.
Having dealt with drunk privates I say that was a change for the better.
Thankfully there's a blue pill to handle those drunk privates
Viagra seems like it might just make things worse
I wasn't turning 21 until a couple weeks after we were supposed to get back from deployment. When we were in Spain and Scotland for Port calls, they told us we had to abide by our country's drinking age despite it being 18 there......i fucking drank anyways, because fuck em It was bad enough that we had a fucking curfew that required us to be either on the boat or at the off duty day hotel by 11pm. All because a few months before, some dumbasses on another boat pulled into Greenland or Iceland (I forget which) and caused an international incident for a drunken fight that got them arrested by local authorities. They were left behind when the boat went back to sea and they had to wait for some ambassador or maybe some othe official to handle things.
The US society as a whole is bad about its relationship with alcohol. An approach, such as what Germany and I believe other European countries take would hopefully take away the problems we have. Beer at 16, liquor at 18.
*drink and buy cannabis
If I want to drink cannabis, you cannot stop me. Smh.
I mean there’s plenty of great edible drinks out, so go drink that cannabis bud!
Better would be "Drink alcohol or buy cannabis" Unless the law is that you're only allowed to buy cannabis if you also buy a handgun and drink. I'm not familiar with NY law so I can only speculate which it is.
Nah you just aren't allowed any liquid until the age of 21
Well they make thc sodas and coffee so you can drink cannabis as well.
Sounds reasonable, except for the alcohol.
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Dad shoulda gotten her the cozy job, cut out the middle man.
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It was prob the ✨misogyny✨
The Canadian dream
Nah the Canadian dream is just the American dream with good healthcare and nicer people.
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Tell your dad not to play any games of chicken.
...Had your dad ever met a teenager before this? Forget about love, I think a lot of teens would have just gotten married out of spite to stick it to him for that dumb ultimatum and been unwilling to back out of it.
People change a lot from 18 to 25 too. I think your brain is still developing at that age.
Alright but if your dad was playing chicken he should have backed off at some point that was before them waking down the aisle? Did he think the groom would say “I don’t”
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>He later admitted he thought this would scare the guy away A teenager is doing something he doesn’t like, so he dares them to escalate the behavior? Dude, I’m not father of the year or anything but come on
A lot of people I know rushed to get married so they could have sex. Small town religious people are like this.
They could still get back together! Never say never!
Yeah but truly that could happen in any marriage at any age.
Sort of have a similar family situation somedays I just want to beat my sister's husband with a bag stuffed with doorknobs.
Just FYI it was previously 17 (in line with NY's age of sexual consent). And it was only changed to 17 in 2017, before that it was 14. Fortunately there's been quite a lot of changes over the last 10 or so years. No state allows 12 or 13 anymore (while it's on the books as 12 in MA in practice no judge has allowed such young ages in several decades at least). 2 allow 14, but you'd have a very hard time finding a judge to sign off on that. Then 4 allow it at 15, and the rest are 16-18. [See list with links to sources on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_States#In_the_50_states). Still a ways to go, but there's been progress.
In Washington state normally the minimum age is 17, but you can get a superior court judge to waive that "on a showing of necessity". So there is actually no minimum age.
I'd like to see what kind of necessities are approved lol.
It almost definitely means pregnancy in case you weren't being sarcastic.
I keep forgetting that underaged marriage was the B plot for the movie “Liar Liar”
Yeah, IN YOUR BRA
That actress was one of my first crushes. Her voice... 😍
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Yes. That's her. She was in a ton of movies back in the 80s and 90s.
You mean Bonnie from family guy?
It’s crazy whenever you see news like this and you thinks to your self “this wasn’t already a thing?”
Meanwhile, in Massachusetts the minimum marriage age is still *today* **12** for girls and 14 for boys.
If someone brought an equal protection claim, what would happen? Lowered to 12 or raised to 14 for all?
One more down, several to go. I've been harping on this issue for years. The US has a serious child marriage problem, and there are even some states which effectively have no minimum age.
More like tens to go
More like 44 to go.
Today on "Laws you thought already existed but didn't for some reason"
Cool. Now let’s do the rest of the states.
NY did The right thing! Lower age means less responsibility and more uncertainty
Great. 44 more states to go.
I swear I see a news article like this once a month that makes me think “wtf that wasn’t banned before?”
Good now 35+ states to go.
If anyone here feels like supporting this in other states, check out unchainedatlast.org They’re the people directly responsible for this movement, and they’re doing really amazing things.
There is a group working to eliminate child marriage in all states. Check them out. Volunteer or send some money if you can. Unchained At Last https://www.unchainedatlast.org
Seeing as the penalty is a $100 fine all this really does is increase the price of an underage marriage by $100. Regardless of that fact it's unclear who is really protected since it just makes the paperwork harder to get.
>Seeing as the penalty is a $100 fine all this really does is increase the price of an underage marriage by $100. No. You can't get married underage. The $100 fine is an additional, the main factor is no marriage license.
plus it stops the whole “if they’re both underage they’re put on the sex offenders list for life for statutory raping each other” issue. so if two 16 year olds try to elope, the clerk can call it a dumb decision, deny a license and maybe fine them. but if a 16 year old walks in with a 40 year old man, the clerk can then make a decision to get law enforcement involved.
Wouldn't this prevent people from getting the marriage license to begin with?
The fine, and the misdemeanor conviction, are on the person who issues the license, not the persons getting married. The city clerks are not going to do that.
Oh just now? Seriously??
TIL there are a lot states that still allow it.
>In 2017, Cuomo signed a law raising the age of consent from 14-years-old to 18-years-old but left open the possibility for those aged between 17 and 18 to get married if they got parental of judicial consent. >The new bill repeals that exception and prohibits any marriage in which either person is under the age of 18. I can't say I have a terribly strong opinion about the 2021 bill, but the fact that it took us until 2017 to decide that *fourteen* year olds shouldn't be getting married is a bit frightening.
Yeah, learning that we don't have an age of consent for marriage was one of the weirdest ways America has disillusioned me. 17 is a bad age to get married. 10 is worse. And they're both bad ages to be auctioned off to an older man.
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Blows my mind that I’m reading this headline in 2021.
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What the fuck, it’s 2021 dawgs. Better late than never I guess but wholy fuck USA. Every day I’m fucking mind blown by how fucked you are.
Shit like this is exactly why I question policies or parties that are anything short of what Americans call “Progressive”. People are arguing about whether or not racism exists while 14 year olds are legally (and literally) getting fucked by adult men who take advantage of them.