California is currently one of only three states in the country — alongside Mississippi and New Mexico — that sets no minimum age at all for marriage, allowing a child of any age to be legally wed as long as a parent or guardian signs off. A bill designed to close that loophole for good just cleared a major hurdle in Sacramento, passing the state Senate on a unanimous 38-0 vote this past Wednesday.
Not everyone supports a zero-exception approach. ACLU California Action has emerged as the primary organization opposing AB 1267, arguing in committee filings that an absolute prohibition unduly infringes on fundamental marriage rights and risks driving minors in difficult domestic situations further underground, KFI AM 640 reported. The group has historically resisted total bans on the grounds that they could disempower mature minors or pregnant teenagers navigating already complicated circumstances.
what‽
that’s the American Civil Liberties Union! it’s the biggest progressive advocacy group!
yes, the article says the bill was amended to make “any minor marriage performed on or after January 1, 2027, [] legally prohibited but voidable at the option of the person who married as a minor, rather than automatically void” to address those concerns, but 1. the article also says there was a 2018 attempt with similar opposition and I doubt nobody thought of this solution then, so I don’t think this solution quelled the opposition 2. that seems to defeat the point where enacting a ban instead of the 2018 watered-down act’s mandated counseling would ban forced marriage! if the marriage becomes null then the parents would know the minor reported it, no?
Well, I guess that means my next vacation spot changes to Mississippi (females can marry at 15 with no age gap limits) or Oklahoma (children of any age can be married with a court order).
… to go to next and protest so they do the same thing. Change their laws.
Siri, look up the average cost to bribe a judge to let you marry a kid in Oklaho oh no is voice to text is still on fuc
allowing a child of any age to be legally wed as long as a parent or guardian signs off.
Then it goes before a judge who has to agree to it. I don’t know about y’all’s courthouse’s, but the judges in the county I grew up in were having none of that shit every time I found out about teenagers trying to get married
About fucking time. Fucking fundie Christians marrying children off to grown pedos.
I’ll tell you this: hate is hate. You can flavor it any way you want. Everybody hates someone. Ukrainians hate Russians, Zionists hate Palestinians, and so on.
You can call the hate righteous or predatory. You can lynch a Black man because you’re white, or you can support putting a rapist and murderer in the gas chamber because of what he did. However you justify it, hate is still hate.
But as soon as you say something as dumb as this followed by the bandwagon, you’re no different from the people you’re condemning. You’re just as pitiful as the pedophile, just as contemptuous as the racist, and just as ignorant as the person you’re calling an idiot.
So don’t go thinking you’re somehow high and mighty simply because you believe your hate is purer than everyone else’s.
Disclaimer: I do not support sexual crimes or abuse of any kind, nor do I support MAGA, Republican extremism, or religious fundamentalism.
lol. No.
Being mad about child rape is actually not the same as child rape.
This isn’t even punishing the child rapists, and you’re still mad. It’s just taking away the legal avenue to rape children.
Ya that’s not what you’re mad at.
You’re making an all-encompassing declarative statement insinuating that fundamentalist Christians are marrying off their children to grown pedophiles. That is a hateful generalization supported by literally no actual facts. You’re doing the exact same thing as someone claiming that drag queens, as a group, are sexualizing children.
And before you put your thumbs to the screen, yes, I realize there have been isolated incidents of this happening. Crimes happen across the board, and they deserve to be investigated and punished by the law. That’s not the issue here. The issue is that you’re using an isolated subject to justify what is ultimately a hateful generalization about a particular group of people. That’s prejudice and hateful, regardless of which group you’re directing it toward.
And your link is totally irrelevant in this case. It is obvious that you did not catch on to what I was saying.
Women are nothing but objects with slight monetary value according to them!
Women, and girls, are objects to these people. Some try to dress it up by treating a woman like a prized horse in Kentucky, maybe even chandeliers in her barn, but that’s as far as it goes.
We’re not people, and sometimes don’t get to be kids, with this subset of humanity.
It’s not just fundie Christians, unfortunately. Way too many cultures do this, religious or otherwise.
2026, California bans child marriage.
Glad they got that squared away.
It took until 2006 for Washington to ban beastiality and only after a Boeing engineer let a horse diddle him and he died from a burst colon.
Ya… That video made the rounds right along with two girls one cup and one man one jar.
I didn’t know there was a video!
Mr Hands?
That’s my guess too
Woof.
It wouldn’t be surprising to me if California or NYC ends up being the new capitals of a refreshed America. They still have sane leaders who aren’t bankrupt in all the ways.
California
They still have sane leaders
No, Gavin Newsom is at best a moderate. He’s helped push for a lot of the surveillance state that’s being rolled out in the US. Same with New York’s governor.
That being said, Zoran Mamdani (who’s the mayor of NYC, not governor of the state) is doing a good job so far and I’m looking forward to what him and his allies do in the next few years
No, Gavin Newsom is at best a moderate
“At best” is doing heavy work here. His position is like “compared to MAGA, I’ll cut the death rate at the concentration camps. Everybody look, I just owned Drumpf!”
But Mamdani is my guy. Never thought fixing potholes could give me hope in the future… It’s like we’ve been in an abusive relationship so long that we forgot what a healthy one looks like
Oklahoma closed theirs this year. They were one of four with no statutory minimum. See: Unchained at Last.
It’s good that it’s closed, but I wonder how much this loophole was actually used.
mentioned in the article:
An analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by the advocacy organization Unchained At Last estimated that roughly 35,000 minors were married in California between 2000 and 2021, with the vast majority of those cases involving underage girls wed to adult men, the same report notes.
That’s horrible
Horrible at scale
Article says 35k but the quote from the website they used says 315k https://www.unchainedatlast.org/united-states-child-marriage-problem-study-findings-through-2021/
315k is for the whole US. That being said, the 35k seems to be a rough estimate because California does not provide census data.
Sick. Twisted. The fall of Roe is a push for more of that.
Make a list and throw these dudes in jail
Child marriage is still legal in 33 states, and I’ll let you guess as to those states’ political leanings.
If you guessed Republican, the party whose elected representatives boast a higher rate of sex crimes against children than the trans people they tell us to hate… congrats!
The survivor website Unchained At Last tells us:
Between 2000 and 2021, nearly 315,000 children were legally entered into marriage across the U.S. The vast majority [86%] were girls wed to adult men.
9 out of the 10 states with the highest teen pregnancy rates are also, you guessed it…
Is Newsom going to veto this one, too?
He’s basically a republican, so it would make sense.
That religious people are even allowed to be around children is insane.
I would strongly disagree. All mainstream religions condemn pedophilia. In fact, Christianity in particular was instrumental in the shift of social attitudes against child marriage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purity_movement (along with other things such as contraception, pornography, and prostitution, among a broader movement that opposed alcohol and slavery). It would be fair to point out that one might not give it too much credit as everybody was Christian at the time.
They’re scrambling to close a loophole that allows outrageous financial aide and scholarships for parents who wed their children before college.
