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.
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.
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.
That’s interesting. I almost always side with those two orgs so I’ll have to read more about why they take this position. The way you state it sounds pretty bad.
I remember distinctly it was like to be a teenager and realize I was every bit as capable of making rational decisions as the adults around me, and frustrated that it wasn’t really recognized. That’s not to say it was true for my peers or didn’t require being well-informed in the first place. But as a result I’m generally in favor of lessening restrictions on minors where there’s no direct harm and raising penalties on adults who manipulate or abuse them. So I’ll hold out some hope that these orgs want that but are just communicating it poorly (still a problem, but more easily solved).
Planned Parenthood is also lobbying against the billionaire tax, due to their belief it would lower healthcare funding.
How the fuck do they come up with this conclusion?
Marriage is a government tax and legal document. It doesn’t give, take, or mandate much else.
It gives predators an exception from statutory rape laws regarding their underage spouses. But I guess that’s mere substance
A comment here https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladviceofftopic/comments/8ouarp/do_statutory_rape_laws_apply_in_the_united_states/
Says that marital rape is illegal everywhere while it does exempt statutory rape in some places. If true:
To have a reasonable discussion about the topic, one must be able to rationally discuss that statutory rape is rape between consenting people where one party is considered unable to consent due to law. Marriage acts as exempting the inability to consent, making it legal.
For that to stand during a marriage, both parties must still consent, else it’s illegal marital rape.
One can argue that someone under 18 should never be able to lawfully consent, but the reality is people under 18 are constantly choosing to have sex, so a non-nuanced ban doesn’t reflect reality.
Hard lines are always nonsense, as 17.99+18 being hard illegal and 18.0+55 being totally fine, is also nonsense. So what is a good solution that protects the people who need to be protected and allows the people who want and should have their freedom? Probably isn’t one.
At what age can someone be considered able to consent “meaningfully”? What happens when someone is manipulated, groomed, or coerced into giving consent to a predatory “partner”? There are xtian cults in the US that teach their members pedophilia is Fine Actually, where the children consent to sex with adults. What does consent mean, there?
It’s easy to talk about choice and freedom, but less easy to discuss what produces a choice and what comprises freedom. Our understanding is imperfect, thus our laws are also imperfect…
Whatever the case, I think the important thing is being able to identify and stop predatory behavior and abuse. That’s something a community is more suited for than a government, unless we accept mass surveillance. Sadly, our communities at large are in a sorry state right now, but that’s a whole discussion in itself.
Weird how the USA has so much in common with countries like Saudi Arabia, yemen, Somalia
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.
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.
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.
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."
