California has officially banned child marriage, with Governor Gavin Newsom signing legislation to end the practice that is still legal in 32 US states.
The new law, which will come into effect on 1 January, states people must be 18 to get married in the Golden State.
Newsom called it a “long overdue measure to protect young Californians and minors”. He signed the bill into law with Courtney Stodden, whose parents allowed her to marry a 50-year-old Hollywood actor when she was just 16.
propose the ban in all 50 states
investigate every single elected official who comes out in opposition
We can’t even be bothered to investigate those who are in the Epstein files.
I wonder
What kind of people
https://www.newsweek.com/these-michigan-republicans-voted-against-child-marriage-ban-1808308
Consistently vote against it?
From Wikipedia:
Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Oklahoma do not allow underage marriage. The other states allow an underage person to marry in the following circumstances:
If one or more of the following apply:
- consent of the parents or legal guardians of the >minor
- consent of a court clerk or judge
- if the minor is emancipated.
Or in exceptional circumstances if one or more of the following circumstances apply:
- consent of a superior court judge, rather than a local judge, is required
- if one of the parties is pregnant
- if the minor has given birth to a child
Basically, in these places, there’s a loophole where offenders can marry their rape victims after the fact to make it look proper for the church or something. That and also allow parents or guardians to sell minors into arranged marriages.
I wonder if anyone was dumb enough to oppose this ban and if so we should list them.
An especially cruel catch-22 in child marriage is that the underage person cannot file for divorce until they’re an adult.
Well, yeah. That’s sinful! And they’re not old enough to make that decision. Best let the husband do the thinking for both of them.
/s
https://calmatters.org/politics/2026/09/california-child-marriage/
Unfortunately, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU are pro-child marriage and they spend big to keep it legal.
Children have a right to marry, the ACLU argues, and stripping them of that right would take away a pathway to their emancipation and independent healthcare decisions. For Planned Parenthood, the freedom for children to marry is about allowing people reproductive choice and bodily autonomy.
But their efforts have repeatedly failed in California, where Planned Parenthood and the ACLU have lobbied hard against restricting child marriage, although those groups have largely stayed silent on the issue in other Democratic-controlled states.
In a June opposition letter, the organization wrote, “Prohibiting minors from marrying in every case is a departure from California’s longstanding commitment to honoring minors’ ability to make important personal decisions for themselves, particularly in the realm of reproductive autonomy.”
These two organizations are entirely misled and spreading misleading information on this issue and are harming kids (vast majority are young girls) with that rhetoric above. Emancipation and reproductive autonomy should not be tied to marriage in the first place.
Children’s freedom to marry? How oxymoronic. Might as well argue for selling yourself into slavery as a “pathway to emancipation.”
Or that kids should be able to sell their own organs as a “path to financial independence.”
What is oxymoronic about a child’s freedom to marry? An oxymoron is two ideas that are contradictory expressed together. Which two words from those 3 are contradictory? I guess I can see an argument for freedom and marry if you are super anti-marriage.
Also, do you think all marriages involving underage people are sex slavery situations?
I think any kind of legally binding commitment for kids is at best problematic, even before bringing marriage and sex into the question.
And I think the whole emancipation angle (especially when talking about marriage as a path to emancipation, that just sounds coercive from the get go) is more of a sign of how our society at large fails kids stuck in situations they want to get out of.
Agree completely. It would be better if we dealt with both why a child needs to be emancipated and how to help them become so with adequate support systems in place that doesn’t require them to marry someone, regardless of that person’s age. I am only saying that there are reasons why a 16 year old might want to marry another 16 year old that do not involve sex slavery.
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I don’t disagree with their reasoning. This is an area where we’d want studies to investigate if their argument has merit
I think the data would show the case they’re arguing for is uncommon, making it a poor defense of child marriage, but it’s good to verify initial feelings with data
I understand both orgs’ stances, honestly. I don’t think I fully agree with them, but if two 17 year old kids want to marry and have supportive parents, then I’m OK with that. Two 14 year old kids? I’m not OK with that. A 17 and 16 year old? I’m probably not OK with it but could keep an open mind. Not all underage marriages are sex slavery or pregnancy traps or arranged marriages or other harmful situations. The issue is there is not enough white area, too much black area, and very subjective grey area. There is more harm in allowing it and not enough good.
I’m glad CA changed their laws, but I do understand the arguments against it.
It’s interesting to point out too that some of these states, like Oklahoma, only joined the list within the last year as well.
In the assembly, it looks like 8 Republicans voted against and 5 more abstained.
ACLU California Action and the City of Mission Viejo also opposed the legislation. (Click on Supporters and Opponents to read the ACLU’s opinion.)
Sounds like wikipedia needs an update, it’s at least banned in missouri as of like a year ago despite failing a number of times in recent history.
https://www.recordinglaw.com/news/missouri-child-marriage-ban-emancipation/
What’s the Venn diagram with cousin marriage, I wonder
Weird how the USA has so much in common with countries like Saudi Arabia, yemen, Somalia
Map of places where a judge can OK a marriage. I’m not saying the USA is good, but Europe has plenty of spots wheee you can technically marry as a 16 year old (or less). Worldwide problem.
Yeah, marriage at 16 with parental consent is pretty commonly allowed throughout the world.
I’ll never say no to a map
What’s going on with China? Some kind of longitude dependant system?
The minimum age differs by gender. Minimum age for men is 22, minimum age for women is 20.
I was joking, but that sounds stupid.
So, apparently, does France. France has the same exceptions to allow 16 year olds to marry adults. And Spain. And Italy. And virtually the entirety of Eastern Europe. Belgium has no minimum age as long as a judge allows it.
If you look at the map of where minors can get married to adults without parental consent, Scotland is more lenient than anywhere in the US. Scotland is actually one of a tiny tiny few countries that allow minors to marry adults without any exceptions required. Adults can just outright marry children in Scotland without issue. Only 7 countries in the world allow that. Most in Africa and the Middle East. And then Scotland.
Y’all Qaeda lives
Its not popular - hence why it’s changing. Nuance is lost on the internet, but people really need to start chilling out about making blanket assumptions of huge swaths of people.
Its one of the “automatic assumptions” people have - that it IS illegal. So they wouldn’t bother looking it up.
Most Americans don’t have the slightest idea of what is/isn’t legal. Gotta remember, before the internet, you had to get a physical copy of your state’s statutes. These change frequently, and are quite large.
Legalinfo first started in 1994, and it took a much longer time before states have their own websites.
Yes, there are literalist religious people everywhere.
Imagine that you were omnipotent, omniscient, and master of the entire universe. You decided that you were going to give one – just one – book to humanity. It would be their moral compass, an insight into their nature and into yours, and act as a guide for how they could live rightly and walk a path that would lead their souls into an eternity with you. Obviously, the first thing you would want to put in there are some totally unscientific, archaic behavioural codes for menstruating women, and for pregnant women after they give birth. You would want to be sure to help them regulate slavery and specify how badly they were allowed to beat their slaves. And of course, you would want the book to be chock full of mythology – a creation myth, a flood myth, a fictional exodus, and hagiographical stories about how your loyal armies killed the shit out of everyone who dared to worship the wrong gods. There is a point here about the Bible that, in any estimation, really cannot be understated: there is absolutely nothing in the Bible that could not have been simply made up by Bronze-Age human beings. Nothing at all. There are no profound scientific insights that such cultures could never have known. There is some bogus cosmology, a flat Earth, and instructions for how to slaughter animals among other profound insights. Now, some Christians are keen to point out that the Jews did apparently get some things right. They had “Imagine that you were the perfect, omnipotent, all-knowing Lord and Creator of a sanitation system… but so did ancient Egypt, the Hittites, the Elamites, and the Aegean civilization. So, big whoop. They also had some codes for cleansing themselves after handling dead bodies or people with leprosy, but these rituals also included ritual animal sacrifice. Not exactly innovative. Moreover, the rituals themselves were stupid – after handling a corpse, for example, you would be “unclean for seven days” [Numbers 19:11]. This obviously had little to do with hygiene. Then we have the New Testament. Written by anonymous authors decades after the events purportedly happened and filled with internal factual contradictions, with no trace of the original manuscripts and thousands of copies rife with errors, there is nothing about the New Testament that demands that a rational person should believe it to be divinely inspired. I challenge Christians to show that the evidence demanded that we believe the supernatural claims of the Bible are anything more than made-up. There is simply no reason whatsoever for any rational person to make such an assumption. Is the Bible really the best God could do? Is this book of myths, scientific blunders, and ambiguous or even downright demonstrably bogus historicity really what anyone really thinks the omnipotent Lord of the universe would bestow upon humanity? That this God would ignore humanity for the bulk of its 200,000+ years on the Earth, only deciding to reveal his One True Religion to a small, mostly illiterate Bronze Age tribal culture? Think of all the things the Bible could be if it were really divinely inspired. Think of all the knowledge and insight such a holy book could contain that simply could never have been made up – profound scientific insights, timeless moral instruction, and revelation clear enough to prevent the innumerable schisms in Christian theology over fundamental issues, like how to attain salvation. Any sane, rational view of the Bible shows it to be little more than the confused scribblings of ignorant Bronze or early Iron Age tribes.
Then imagine modern people taking it all seriously. It is heart breaking.
Any sane, rational view of the Bible shows it to be little more than the confused scribblings of ignorant Bronze or early Iron Age tribes.
Seems more likely it’s Hellenistic-Roman period literature. The bronze/iron age stuff largely marketing, dab a teabag on it & say ‘ye olde booke’.
“Consider if you go the New Testament for instruction on how to live, you are told to give away all your possessions, make no plans for the future, reject your family if they disagree with you, and stay celibate if you can (see respectively Matthew 19.21, Matthew 6.25, Matthew 12.48, and 1 Corinthians 7). This is the outlook of people who sincerely believed that the Messiah was going to return next week or next month, anyway very soon. It is an unlivable ethic, and when after several centuries the Second Coming had still not materialised and hope of it had been deferred sine die, more was needed in the way of ethics. Where did it come from? From Greek philosophy – not least from the Stoics – and from the Roman Republican virtues of probity, honour, duty, restraint, respect, friendship and generosity that Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Horace, and countless others wrote about and enjoined ceaselessly. ‘Christian values’ are largely Greek and Roman secular values. So Christianity is not even Christianity. It is more correct to say that ‘we are Greeks and Romans’ and meant that we are defined by the following words – and therefore concepts – of classical Greek and Latin origin: democracy, liberalism, values, history, morality, comedy, tragedy, literature, music, academy, alphabet, memory, politics, ethics, populace, geography, energy, exploration, hegemony, theory, mathematics, science, theatre, medicine, gymnasium, climate, clone, bureaucracy, dialect, analogy, psychology, method, nostalgia, organ, encyclopaedia, education, paradox, empiricism, polemic, rhetoric, dinosaur, telescope, system, school, trophy, type, fantasy, photography…take almost any word denoting political and social institutions, ideas, learning, science and technology, medicine, and culture, and it derives from the language – and therefore the ideas and the history of ancient Greece and Rome."
The 27 book NT has rather a lot going on, one can pull pretty much whatever they wish from it and laity reading the scriptures more a novel protestant meme that led to one hell of mess if you look at the state of bible worship in the US.
Cut your balls off for God as Matthean Jesus was preaching, or one could look to force Jezebels into bed and kill the kids to teach her a lesson, but deacons and above should only have one wife…something for all.
Lots of peeps thought the end was coming much as we have today, but I’d be wary of sugesing all the ascetic traditions were hysterical end times peeps. The same apocalyptic memes trending in the modern day via zombies or aliens or nukes or asteroids or whatever. I think around Mary Shelly is where the public seems to prefer sciencey sounding hysteria devoid of theological language but that seems more fashion vibes.
My kids seem to prefer Harry Potter as their virginal magus messiah that touched death to save the world, like temu Jesus to me written by a high grade twat but to each their own.
Not sure it’s all Greek/Roman either as the western latin tradition seems keen to push. African, Syriac and many more seems rather important. Baghdad more the center of the Christian world than Rome for some time afaiu.
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For those who don’t understand why child marriage is usually a spectacularly bad idea for the underaged partner in one:
https://unchainedatlast.org/child-marriage-in-the-u-s/
Also includes map of which states allow underage marriage and under what conditions, as well as a map of youngest allowable marriage in that state (apparently both NM and MS have no lower limit).
Basically exactly what I expected the map, save for 2
Kudos to Oklahoma. Would not have expected them to have strong anti-child marriage laws
Shame on Illinois. Didn’t expect them to be so receptive of child marriage
Sorry to any other outliars I may have missed. Generally seems to be Republicans in favor of child marriage, with Democratic states banning it
Now how are Republicans supposed to get a date?
By force, of course.
This is how I learned there is at least one state (Mississipi) where you can get married aged 0
Don’t you remember that classic Mississippi game show, “Who Wants to Marry a Baby? No, seriously, who actually wants to marry a real baby? Like, legally. Meaning all of the legal protections of marriage apply to you and this actual infant. Who wants to? It’s legal. Chris Hansen isn’t here. This isn’t a sting. It’s legal for whatever god forsaken reason. Fuck this stupid fucking backwards ass state.”
If you were a civil war veteran and you died, you could pass your military pension on to your wife. Because of this, it wasn’t uncommon for an elderly man to marry a young girl so she would get the pension. Often the girl would do basic chores for the elderly man in exchange. Because of this practice the last civil war widow died in 2020 (she married a 93 year old veteran when she was 17). A certain amount of the attitude is a weird cultural relic coming from this practice.
Pretty sure there are no more civil war veterans, so let’s just go ahead and make child marriage illegal now. The “protect the children” party surely would have no problem banning child marriage, right? Right?
But if I can’t give my 14 year old daughter to Tom down the street, he won’t give me 3 goats.
Dude I need that dowry. I love my daughter, sure. But not like I love goats.
Dowry… suuure…
That’s some weird ‘meet marry fuck’.game you got going there…
The USA is a third world country
Marriage is a contract. People can’t enter into contract under 18 without parental consent. Why is this true, but somehow a child has capacity to enter a life long contract of marriage? I get parental consent is needed for child marriage, but it still makes no sense to have a child enter a contract this intense at an age they can’t do it without parental consent. You can’t vote or serve in the military yet, but you have the capacity to enter a marriage contract? That’s fucking stupid.
Marriage is a government tax and legal document. It doesn’t give, take, or mandate much else.
It originally started as a religious practice then became codified into law
But Heaven forbid you marry more than one person, because then the government might send you to jail.
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