Yesterday/today, the ex-homeschooler part of the internet that I sometimes circulate in has been frothing at the mouth over this (I, too, frothed):
http://letthemmarry.org/gtm-retreat/
Distillation: Some ultra-conservative families want to get together in Kansas for a "retreat" and betroth their underage children. And by underage, I mean possibly as young as twelve.
Here's one article (of several) that summarizes some of their teachings: https://homeschoolersanonymous.org/2016/05/05/get-them-married-selling-virgin-daughters/
I vacillate between thinking that there probably aren't that many people who would be interested in such a thing, and thinking that when I was their target age for wives, I would have wanted to go because marriage and kids was the only thing that I really saw as a life option and if there wasn't going to be anything else for me, why wait around? [swears incoherently at past iteration of self]
Some of the responses have suggested alerting the FBI because this may count as child trafficking (where dowry is involved, and families come from out of state). The low age of legal marriage in many states has been brought up as well.
And then the event got postponed because the venue they rented for the event decided they didn't want to be associated with this.
I got married fairly young (19) and know a couple girls who got married a year or two younger than that-- one of my best friends at the time wanted to marry her boyfriend at seventeen and was worried her parents wouldn't permit it-- they did permit it -- and I know of several others that got married as young as fifteen, sometimes to men a decade or more older than them. I don't consider young/underage marriage to be advantageous in any way (and abhor it when people make it out to be so, especially when their best argument is that their grandparents did and are still married 50 years later), and based on my own experience of being a young parent, I get anxiety on behalf of other girls who have children that young, especially when coming from this culture where using pretty much any form of birth control other than breastfeeding is basically going to send you to hell.
I try to let other people live their own lives, and don't tend to like an excess of laws, but damn. My gut knowledge is that these underage children are not living their own lives, and why the hell is it legal for people to get married before legal adulthood?-- even before they can legally consent to sex, in some cases.
Why the hell is this still legal?
http://letthemmarry.org/gtm-retreat/
Distillation: Some ultra-conservative families want to get together in Kansas for a "retreat" and betroth their underage children. And by underage, I mean possibly as young as twelve.
Here's one article (of several) that summarizes some of their teachings: https://homeschoolersanonymous.org/2016/05/05/get-them-married-selling-virgin-daughters/
I vacillate between thinking that there probably aren't that many people who would be interested in such a thing, and thinking that when I was their target age for wives, I would have wanted to go because marriage and kids was the only thing that I really saw as a life option and if there wasn't going to be anything else for me, why wait around? [swears incoherently at past iteration of self]
Some of the responses have suggested alerting the FBI because this may count as child trafficking (where dowry is involved, and families come from out of state). The low age of legal marriage in many states has been brought up as well.
And then the event got postponed because the venue they rented for the event decided they didn't want to be associated with this.
I got married fairly young (19) and know a couple girls who got married a year or two younger than that-- one of my best friends at the time wanted to marry her boyfriend at seventeen and was worried her parents wouldn't permit it-- they did permit it -- and I know of several others that got married as young as fifteen, sometimes to men a decade or more older than them. I don't consider young/underage marriage to be advantageous in any way (and abhor it when people make it out to be so, especially when their best argument is that their grandparents did and are still married 50 years later), and based on my own experience of being a young parent, I get anxiety on behalf of other girls who have children that young, especially when coming from this culture where using pretty much any form of birth control other than breastfeeding is basically going to send you to hell.
I try to let other people live their own lives, and don't tend to like an excess of laws, but damn. My gut knowledge is that these underage children are not living their own lives, and why the hell is it legal for people to get married before legal adulthood?-- even before they can legally consent to sex, in some cases.
Why the hell is this still legal?