https://www.unchainedatlast.org/another-victory-oregon-banne...
([1] I don’t say “fail” because a marriage ending isn’t necessarily failure, if your perspective is humans are not optimally wired for a lifetime with a single partner)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/11/01/child-mar...
It's good to get legislation to close these loopholes, but I think we're kidding ourselves if we take the "300,000 children" statistic at face value. The other thing to point out is that this 2025, so marriage is hardly a prerequisite to sex, and in fact a lot of these marriage licenses are granted when one someone turns up pregnant.
Personally I think this is a pretty clear-cut case of papering over a much bigger issue: parts of this country have really poor educational and financial outcomes for whole communities of people. As we've seen around the world, when you raise the standard of education and wealth, within a generation or two people change their habits around marriage, reproduction, etc.
But of course that's a lot harder to fix than just passing a bill.
tl;dr Instead of further regulating people's lives as the OP suggested, there are other more effective levers you can push. Changing the legal age of marriage to 21 will stop marriages under than age, but not relationships, pregnancies, and dropping out of education/work.
Middle ground: simplify divorce for marriages entered into while either party was under 21 and the marriage is dissolved in fewer than N years.
We're amid a long-term decline in American marriage rates [1]. If the goal is boosting marriage, I'm not sure raising barriers helps. (Though apparently the benefits of marriage are more mixed than I thought [2]. And even birth rates are decoupling from marriage rates [3].)
Huh, in the course of researching this comment I've gone from slightly against your position (based solely on priors) to solidly for it. There isn't a great argument for allowing legal marriage before 21. If folks want to have civic or religious ceremonies earlier, by all means, go for it--that doesn't mean it need involve the state.
[1] https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/lo...
If they're allowed to kill, they should be allowed to marry.
toomuchtodo•8mo ago
JumpCrisscross•8mo ago
Oh wow, you'd think in the current political climate this would open the carburetor on these bills.