It's really adolescent marriage (the threshold was moved from 16 to 18). Teenage marriages were fairly common in the West well into the 20th century. Vatican City had a minimum age of 12 on the books until 2013.
Europe is now more or less consistently 18 for parental consent, but marriages at a younger age are still permitted across the EU with judicial consent.
> Vatican City had a minimum age of 12 on the books until 2013.
I mean, are there any children who are citizens of the Vatican City, given its bizarre citizenship situation? (Citizenship is based, essentially, on _employment_, and lapses when employees retire; sole exception, AIUI, is retiring popes, who get a free pass.) I would suspect that this is a holdover from the Papal States (which bit the dust in 1870, when this sort of thing was more acceptable), which someone finally got around to cleaning up.
What they mean is the ability to marry at 16. It's not exactly a small child age, it's teen age.
I suspect that this norm lingers from times of stricter social norms and before the pill, when a marriage would be a way to avoid a scandal when the prospective bride were pregnant.
i don't think it had anything to do with lack of birthcontrol or fear of scandals, but rather with the religious definition of a marriageable age. there is also is also the biological definition which would make you marriageable as soon as you are able to conceive. but it is worth noting that apparently in the 19th century girls average age for puberty was 15 and for boys it was 17.
22 of these are "red" states: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North + South Carolina, North + South Dakota, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
6 more are blue-leaning "purple": Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico and Wisconsin.
Only four are "blue": California (ban coming into effect 2027 as per article), Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland.
I don't understand why the ban cannot come into effect immediately. Like, wouldn't want to spoil someone's child marriage plans in the next year or so because it would be rude?
> I don't understand why the ban cannot come into effect immediately.
This is the default in Californias constitution:
> Except as provided in paragraphs (2) and (3) of this subdivision [Article 4, section 8], a statute enacted at a regular session shall go into effect on January 1 next following a 90-day period from the date of enactment of the statute.
There are additional legislative hurdles to enact legislation faster than that.
Kentucky had a bill up for vote this year, passed the senate but died in the house. One of the lawmakers specifically amended it to exempt cases where the child is pregnant.
I hate to upend your red-state Reddit zinger, but the fact is the law doesn't take effect until January 2027, so until such time there is NO age limit in California.
Not true, you can certainly enter into military service contracts and student debt obligations! And unlike marriage, there is no easy way to dissolve those.
The Findings section has a long, detailed list of child marriage harm. In short, preventing marriage before 18 provides for immense harm reduction in the aggregate and improved odds of life success. I’d push the age to 21 if I could. Rental car companies always had it right to restrict rentals to <25 age cohort due to front lobe development timeline.
(The US allows student debt and military obligations at an age when this cohort is vulnerable to systemically exploit young people, these should not be used as examples imho)
You assume harm reduction is everyone's goal. Some people just want to fuck young girls. Many of the current political party in power included. It's pervasive. Just grab them by the pussy and no one takes the victims seriously. If you go after them for their many crimes it's "lawfare".
I also think you shouldn't be able to enter into those.
Honestly, if anything the gray area should work in the other direction: no entering into life -changing legally-binding contracts until you've had the full right to vote, work, and to self determination for...oh, let's say one to two years?
I don't get how child marriage can be legal. Like, yeah, they get permission from their parents. But does the fact that they're married negate other laws??? I mean, it's still rape. It's still like child abuse. Does marriage = emancipation?
You are just repeating the framing of the article. Next you'll mention a citation from a biased source.
Tht article doesn't mention the majority of those marriages between 17 year old female "children" marrying male "adults" (that are 18, 19 or 20 years old).
Another comment pointed out that the article is sensationalist.
If you bucket all the marries this law would affect, the 50 year old marriage is a far outlier. Most of the marriage gaps for these minors are < 1-2yrs.
Goes without saying nobody should be married before they're 18 (or probably 25, for matter, but that's another story), but it seems performative and disingenuous to call this 'child marriage'. A child is a person who hasn't yet reached puberty - clearly that isn't applicable to, say, a 17 year old.
It would be more accurate (and garner less headlines) to say California has made it unlawful for a minor to get married.
FWIW the situation in the UK, that the BBC doesn’t mention, is similarly muddy.
In England and Wales, since 2022, the minimum age is 18. Previously it was 16 with parental consent, which is the situation in (the rather more religious) Northern Ireland.
In Scotland the age is 16 and parental consent is not required.
So, well into the 20th century young English couples would flee across the border and get married there; most famously at Gretna Green, a town just inside the border.
Scottish marriages involving English/Welsh people under 18 are now not legal.
Campaigners always use examples of old men marrying young girls but that’s not common at all.
96% of children getting married were 16 or 17, and 85% of the adults marrying those children were 18-23. Not quite the horror show that campaigners push.
I agree that no one under 18 should be getting married, I just question their tactics.
It's clear to most people that a marriage between someone 50 and someone 14 is a serious power imbalance and nearly everyone in our society thinks it seems gross and wrong. (Personally I think a marriage between someone 50 and someone 19 still seems bad.)
It's less clear that a marriage between a 17-year-old and a 16-year-old or between a 19-year-old and a 17-year-old is inherently problematic.
According to a news article from a few years ago, groups opposing a previous ban on child marriages in California included the ACLU (who claimed that it "unnecessarily and unduly intrudes on the fundamental right of marriage without sufficient cause") and Planned Parenthood (who said the law should "not impede on the reproductive rights of minors and their ability to decide what is best for them, their health and their lives").
A law saying 18 is minimum marriage age (pretty much all across the world), is simpler to implement that
Marriage OK if (p1>18 && p2 > 18) || (p1>16 && p2 <20) || (p1>17 && p2 <22) ..
Marriage is a civil institution that provides social advantages, and waiting till 18 isn't really a burden for a 16 and 19yo that want to get married, and get those benefits.
Your recent posts tell us that you don't have friends, and that you like spending your time with your wife... and posting online in defense of child marriage.
I have news for you: you are going to be a shitty father.
It's clear that you don't respect women (or girls), and I pray that you are sterile, or that you grow the fuck up.
I get it though: you're a "man" who thinks of women as property and accessories, not as people... here's hoping your wife's next husband is an actual man. You're fucking pathetic.
Yeah, I also question the distinction between a 17 year old marrying a 50 year old and an 18 year old marrying a 50 year old. Does your judgement suddenly magically get better after you turn 18?
At 18, you magically become fully legally responsible for your actions, while at 17 years 12 months 25 days of age much of the responsibility rests on your parents.
> Does your judgement suddenly magically get better after you turn 18?
What I see is that we shelter kids from reality because they're just kids, then these kids grow up to be irresponsible adults, then in turn we create more rules about sheltering "young adults" from consequences. It's a feedback loop.
I’ve thought, since I myself was a child, that the reason adults “shelter” kids from reality is that the adults would have to explain their actions to their children. Modern life is predicated on allowing injustice to persist that is incomprehensible to children. If we don’t keep this from kids, then we have to justify our own actions. Can’t have that! Not in this society. Maybe if society was good and just in any way we wouldn’t need to lie to our kids about it.
The thing you should be feeling now after reading that is shame.
Part of the age line is the fact that we're all admitting that keeping kids in the public school system is keeping them steeped in avoiding thinking for themselves and making their own decisions.
Adulthood used to begin at 13 or so across the world. That didn't mean a 13 year old was going to run the tribe or anything, but then, a junior developer doesn't run the software company either at 25. But adulthood meant having responsibilities, obligations, and being expected to make your own decision. Our school system is designed very specifically to prevent this from happening.
Given that, it does sort of make sense that IF you're being subjected to that sort of psychological abuse, perhaps we can't expect you to be able to make responsible decisions. Those who can generally are the exception, not the rule.
Perhaps rather than drawing all these lines though, we should be seriously considering getting rid of a school system that was modeled off of the Prussian model, which the Nazis were known to enforce, and which is still the ONLY option even in modern day Germany, regardless of how much the parents want to or are capable of home schooling children.
It's because of arguments like these that people like Stallman fell into disgrace. There's no logic in defending pedophilia and definitely no benefits in defending it, it doesn't matter if you think it's a good argument.
Pretty much everywhere that is civilised sets a minimum age for marriage which is often close to or the same as legal adulthood and I fail to see why the U.S. doesn't do this. Why would you consider someone capable of making a huge decision such as marriage and yet not be considered old enough to vote or drink alcohol?
> In the state, there had been no legal age to wed, allowing children to get married as long as their parents consent and a judge signs off on the nuptials.
> There was also no mechanism for people under 18 to get divorced and many girls say they were trapped in abusive and predatory relationships.
Call me misguided, but I don't necessarily see 16 year old and 20 year getting married as equally problematic as the provided examples of 30+ year age gaps.
I think the real issue people are dancing around right now culturally is that these extreme age gap relationships are beginning to make everyone feel very uncomfortable. The difference between a 17 year old and and 18 year old doesn't make them feel less gross and exploitative.
You can drive a car at 15-16 most states, which puts other people's lives in your hands. You can get married between 16 and 18 depending on the state. You can join the army, take on debt, and do pornography at 18, all three of which will completely alter your life long term. You can drink, buy a gun, or enter a casino at 21. These feel someone nonsensically ordered to me. Seems like we should just pick one age for "you can now make and be responsible for your decisions" and stop talking about all of these weird edge cases as if we need the law to deal with all of them.
There is an argument that people should marry when they are (*both*) younger. More time to be fruitful and multiply. More time together, instead of encouraging high "body counts" and high-risk behavior. Delaying marriage is not as altruistic as it sounds.
In tight/smaller communities having kids younger has one massive advantage: your parents/grandparents are actually young and energetic enough to help raise them.
Having active grandparents around to pass down wisdom and share the load beats waiting until your late 30s or 40s just so you can afford to hand your kids off to expensive daycare.
Losing that family safety net is a one reason people are having fewer kids now, and I really doubt it’s making society any happier.
china's TFR comes from the one-child policy. now abolished, the effects still linger. and it also comes from many people not getting married at all mostly because of financial concerns, or maybe women not interested in having a family at all.
what works is that when people get married, many marry young and when they have children the grandparents are around and help as described. i haven't seen anyone with children where the grandparents were not around to help.
It's interesting when states like California decide that those under 18 are too young to make a decision on marriage, but old enough to decide that they want to have sex change surgery.
It seems like you would come to the same conclusion on the question of "how old you have to be before you can make your own decisions" for both issues.
> states like California decide that those under 18 are too young to make a decision on marriage, but old enough to decide that they want to have sex change surgery.
I don’t think this is factually accurate.
Sex-reassignment surgery (or whatever we are calling it these days) requires parental consent in California if the person seeking it is a minor.
Let me describe a few ways why child marriage should be prohibited without any exceptions anywhere:
1. When a minor marries someone of age, their spouse becomes their legal guardian until they become of age (or become emancipated, which is a difficult process generally). Why is that an issue? Well, in abuse situations, it can be incredibly hard for the minor to leave their spouse who is their legal guardian. It's not much different to runaway children being returned to their parents, even when their parents are the source of the abuse. Certain states are worse for this than others, so called "reunification states" where they will absolutely try and return you to your legal guardian unless there's clear and convincing evidence why they shouldn't;
2. A lot of child marriages happen so an adult can escape a statutory rape or rape charge as prosecutors don't tend to prosecute when it's a spouse. It should be noted that spousal rape only became a crime in all 50 states of the US around 2005 (IIRC) and this only really picked up steam around 1990 or so;
3. Because of this lack of power, it creates a whole host of other problems, such as exploitation to the point of trafficking.
Politically, preserving child marriage is a uniquely Republican issue [1].
When a minor marries someone of age, their spouse becomes their legal guardian until they become of age (or become emancipated, which is a difficult process generally).
that sounds totally wrong. not as in you are wrong, but as in this reality is bad. apparently, according to wikipedia at least in some US states, marriage automatically emancipates a minor, but not in massachusetts.
how does that protect 18yr olds from being forced into marriage? a 16yr old can not consent but an 18yr old can? i was hardly any smarter at 18 than i was at 16. in my opinion the problem is not the consent or lack thereof, or the age, the problem is the inability legally or maturity wise, to say "no".
with the right culture and support there is nothing wrong with getting married early.
the problem comes from arranged marriages, especially if there is a large age difference.
instead of setting a minimum age, which does not help much, it should be easier to refuse, and even if agreed, it should be possible for anyone under say 25 to simply have a marriage annulled or a divorce if there are obvious problems (such as the age difference).
but if both are young, then marrying young has its benefits. the younger we are the more adaptable we are, and that helps to build a relationship and makes it easier to get along.
the idea that we should be fully matured adults before getting married doesn't actually work, because living together is part of the process of maturing, and the older you are the more difficult is it to develop certain skills and attitudes that you need for a successful marriage.
in china, people get married much earlier than in the west, but they also have strong family and social support for doing so.
I think "until you received base education and an ability to work/sustain yourself" is a good cut off for woman.
What's disturbing about 16yo marrying 20yo is that in most cases the girl just moves from abusive household to another, now with additional risk of pregnancy (read: another 2 year of total dependence on the sole provider)
18yo is a good cut off not because everyone is suddenly smarter and know what's good and bad, but because by that age people have the ability to leave bad and go live on their own.
Doug Hutchison defends his relationship to 17 year old Courtney Stodden that spans a nearly 35 year age gap. Dr. Drew wants to know if they're aware why people judge them and wonders why they rushed into marriage.
The real scandal is not so much that there are still 32 states allowing child marriage, but that efforts to end the practice are successfully resisted as in Wisconsin:
82 comments
[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 33.0 ms ] threadEurope is now more or less consistently 18 for parental consent, but marriages at a younger age are still permitted across the EU with judicial consent.
I mean, are there any children who are citizens of the Vatican City, given its bizarre citizenship situation? (Citizenship is based, essentially, on _employment_, and lapses when employees retire; sole exception, AIUI, is retiring popes, who get a free pass.) I would suspect that this is a holdover from the Papal States (which bit the dust in 1870, when this sort of thing was more acceptable), which someone finally got around to cleaning up.
I suspect that this norm lingers from times of stricter social norms and before the pill, when a marriage would be a way to avoid a scandal when the prospective bride were pregnant.
6 more are blue-leaning "purple": Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico and Wisconsin.
Only four are "blue": California (ban coming into effect 2027 as per article), Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland.
I don't understand why the ban cannot come into effect immediately. Like, wouldn't want to spoil someone's child marriage plans in the next year or so because it would be rude?
This is the default in Californias constitution:
> Except as provided in paragraphs (2) and (3) of this subdivision [Article 4, section 8], a statute enacted at a regular session shall go into effect on January 1 next following a 90-day period from the date of enactment of the statute.
There are additional legislative hurdles to enact legislation faster than that.
https://calmatters.org/politics/2026/09/child-marriage-ban-n...
Roll tide...... I guess....
The Findings section has a long, detailed list of child marriage harm. In short, preventing marriage before 18 provides for immense harm reduction in the aggregate and improved odds of life success. I’d push the age to 21 if I could. Rental car companies always had it right to restrict rentals to <25 age cohort due to front lobe development timeline.
(The US allows student debt and military obligations at an age when this cohort is vulnerable to systemically exploit young people, these should not be used as examples imho)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31590741/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3621648/
Honestly, if anything the gray area should work in the other direction: no entering into life -changing legally-binding contracts until you've had the full right to vote, work, and to self determination for...oh, let's say one to two years?
I'm not talking about older men here.
I'm saying that we need to be careful to avoid creating harm where there was none.
Tht article doesn't mention the majority of those marriages between 17 year old female "children" marrying male "adults" (that are 18, 19 or 20 years old).
Children versus adults is a common framing, that is repeated by even the less biased sources such as the BBC or PBS: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interactive/child-marriag...
Crossing a legal line from a "child" of 17 to an "adult" of 18 doesn't have the implications about real world differences in wisdom we might hope for.
If you bucket all the marries this law would affect, the 50 year old marriage is a far outlier. Most of the marriage gaps for these minors are < 1-2yrs.
It would be more accurate (and garner less headlines) to say California has made it unlawful for a minor to get married.
In England and Wales, since 2022, the minimum age is 18. Previously it was 16 with parental consent, which is the situation in (the rather more religious) Northern Ireland.
In Scotland the age is 16 and parental consent is not required.
So, well into the 20th century young English couples would flee across the border and get married there; most famously at Gretna Green, a town just inside the border.
Scottish marriages involving English/Welsh people under 18 are now not legal.
96% of children getting married were 16 or 17, and 85% of the adults marrying those children were 18-23. Not quite the horror show that campaigners push.
I agree that no one under 18 should be getting married, I just question their tactics.
Weird.
It's less clear that a marriage between a 17-year-old and a 16-year-old or between a 19-year-old and a 17-year-old is inherently problematic.
According to a news article from a few years ago, groups opposing a previous ban on child marriages in California included the ACLU (who claimed that it "unnecessarily and unduly intrudes on the fundamental right of marriage without sufficient cause") and Planned Parenthood (who said the law should "not impede on the reproductive rights of minors and their ability to decide what is best for them, their health and their lives").
Marriage OK if (p1>18 && p2 > 18) || (p1>16 && p2 <20) || (p1>17 && p2 <22) ..
Marriage is a civil institution that provides social advantages, and waiting till 18 isn't really a burden for a 16 and 19yo that want to get married, and get those benefits.
No one is saying it's common. They're saying it shouldn't happen at all.
I have news for you: you are going to be a shitty father.
It's clear that you don't respect women (or girls), and I pray that you are sterile, or that you grow the fuck up.
I get it though: you're a "man" who thinks of women as property and accessories, not as people... here's hoping your wife's next husband is an actual man. You're fucking pathetic.
What I see is that we shelter kids from reality because they're just kids, then these kids grow up to be irresponsible adults, then in turn we create more rules about sheltering "young adults" from consequences. It's a feedback loop.
The thing you should be feeling now after reading that is shame.
Adulthood used to begin at 13 or so across the world. That didn't mean a 13 year old was going to run the tribe or anything, but then, a junior developer doesn't run the software company either at 25. But adulthood meant having responsibilities, obligations, and being expected to make your own decision. Our school system is designed very specifically to prevent this from happening.
Given that, it does sort of make sense that IF you're being subjected to that sort of psychological abuse, perhaps we can't expect you to be able to make responsible decisions. Those who can generally are the exception, not the rule.
Perhaps rather than drawing all these lines though, we should be seriously considering getting rid of a school system that was modeled off of the Prussian model, which the Nazis were known to enforce, and which is still the ONLY option even in modern day Germany, regardless of how much the parents want to or are capable of home schooling children.
Pretty much everywhere that is civilised sets a minimum age for marriage which is often close to or the same as legal adulthood and I fail to see why the U.S. doesn't do this. Why would you consider someone capable of making a huge decision such as marriage and yet not be considered old enough to vote or drink alcohol?
> There was also no mechanism for people under 18 to get divorced and many girls say they were trapped in abusive and predatory relationships.
Call me misguided, but I don't necessarily see 16 year old and 20 year getting married as equally problematic as the provided examples of 30+ year age gaps.
I think the real issue people are dancing around right now culturally is that these extreme age gap relationships are beginning to make everyone feel very uncomfortable. The difference between a 17 year old and and 18 year old doesn't make them feel less gross and exploitative.
Having active grandparents around to pass down wisdom and share the load beats waiting until your late 30s or 40s just so you can afford to hand your kids off to expensive daycare.
Losing that family safety net is a one reason people are having fewer kids now, and I really doubt it’s making society any happier.
what works is that when people get married, many marry young and when they have children the grandparents are around and help as described. i haven't seen anyone with children where the grandparents were not around to help.
It seems like you would come to the same conclusion on the question of "how old you have to be before you can make your own decisions" for both issues.
an under-18 can not unilaterally decide to get sex change surgery in california.
Should people who are still legally defined as children be allowed to make a decision on those?
I don’t think this is factually accurate.
Sex-reassignment surgery (or whatever we are calling it these days) requires parental consent in California if the person seeking it is a minor.
1. When a minor marries someone of age, their spouse becomes their legal guardian until they become of age (or become emancipated, which is a difficult process generally). Why is that an issue? Well, in abuse situations, it can be incredibly hard for the minor to leave their spouse who is their legal guardian. It's not much different to runaway children being returned to their parents, even when their parents are the source of the abuse. Certain states are worse for this than others, so called "reunification states" where they will absolutely try and return you to your legal guardian unless there's clear and convincing evidence why they shouldn't;
2. A lot of child marriages happen so an adult can escape a statutory rape or rape charge as prosecutors don't tend to prosecute when it's a spouse. It should be noted that spousal rape only became a crime in all 50 states of the US around 2005 (IIRC) and this only really picked up steam around 1990 or so;
3. Because of this lack of power, it creates a whole host of other problems, such as exploitation to the point of trafficking.
Politically, preserving child marriage is a uniquely Republican issue [1].
[1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/repu...
that sounds totally wrong. not as in you are wrong, but as in this reality is bad. apparently, according to wikipedia at least in some US states, marriage automatically emancipates a minor, but not in massachusetts.
with the right culture and support there is nothing wrong with getting married early.
the problem comes from arranged marriages, especially if there is a large age difference.
instead of setting a minimum age, which does not help much, it should be easier to refuse, and even if agreed, it should be possible for anyone under say 25 to simply have a marriage annulled or a divorce if there are obvious problems (such as the age difference).
but if both are young, then marrying young has its benefits. the younger we are the more adaptable we are, and that helps to build a relationship and makes it easier to get along.
the idea that we should be fully matured adults before getting married doesn't actually work, because living together is part of the process of maturing, and the older you are the more difficult is it to develop certain skills and attitudes that you need for a successful marriage.
in china, people get married much earlier than in the west, but they also have strong family and social support for doing so.
In some societies it's okay to marry 6-year-old girls.
Slightly more rational societies link it to puberty in the female. Indeed, their leaders have written entire books to justify such behaviour.
What's disturbing about 16yo marrying 20yo is that in most cases the girl just moves from abusive household to another, now with additional risk of pregnancy (read: another 2 year of total dependence on the sole provider)
18yo is a good cut off not because everyone is suddenly smarter and know what's good and bad, but because by that age people have the ability to leave bad and go live on their own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfGl8ieDdU8
https://wisconsinwatch.org/2026/06/wisconsin-child-marriage-...