Who Decides Age of Marriage?

Lately the FLDS vs. Texas has been the news. Police, using what they say was a telephone plea for help, raided a compound, removing over 400 children. The court jumped at the chance to get involved and has arranged for the children to be separated from their mothers. Some claim they are concerned about some of the marriages being arranged. What is the problem? Arranged marriages occur in many countries around the world including the United States.

Most states set the minimum age to marry between and including 14-18 with New Hampshire setting the minimum age for girls at 13. In Utah for those 15 years old, parental consent must be obtained, approval from Juvenile Court is necessary with the court concluding the marriage is voluntary and in the best interests of the minor. In the best interests of the minor; I wonder what that includes and I wonder if the judge is a member of FLDS? Is that the fox watching the chickens? It is law is it right?

Throughout most of the 19th century, the minimum age of consent for sexual intercourse in many of the states was 10 years old. In Delaware it was seven; as late as 1930 twelve states allowed boys as young as 14 and girls as young as 12 to marry with parental consent.
Governments have problems regulating things:

• The Oregon legislature barred marriages between white people and anyone more than one-quarter black in 1859, just three years after statehood. (It also imposed a $5 tax on black, Chinese, Hawaiian and “mulatto” people.) A few years later, the legislature extended the ban to marriage between whites and “any Negro, Chinese, or any person having one fourth or more Negro, Chinese, or Kanaka (native Hawaiian) blood, or any person having more than one-half Indian blood.” No other state referenced Kanakas, and Nevada was the only other state to mention Chinese.
• Married women were not allowed to make legal contracts in twelve states until 1940.
• The sale of birth control devices to married couples was forbidden until 1965. In the early half of the 1900s contraception was charged with “perversion of natural function,” “immorality” and “fostering egotism and enervating self-indulgence.”
• Interracial marriage was forbidden and punishable by prison in 13 states until 1967.

If the state can decide what is best for the FLDS when do you suppose they will decide what is best for the Church of Christ and what do you suppose that might be?

If the state decides that marriage at 7 years is OK does that make it right? If the state decides that marriage at 7 years is not OK does it make it wrong. Who is to decide these matters and how do they decide? The courts have shown they are not capable of such decisions.

On the subject of adolescence a couple of stories recently in The Mountain Press. One, we have Miley Cyrus, I believe she is 15 years old, embarrassed over photographs she had taken of her by a professional photographer. Photographs approved by her parents. Photographs that have been called “risqué.” Second, we have a singing group, the Naked Brothers, 10 and 13 years old respectively appearing at Wal-Mart promoting their latest DVD “I Don’t Want to Go to School.”

Miley appears on the Disney Channel and the Naked Brothers appear on the Nicolodean channel. Both considered to be “kid friendly and family oriented.” Not so recently we have Jamie Spears, 16-years old, unmarried, pregnant on the Nicolodean channel's most popular show.

The world has changed. The transition between childhood and adulthood is much longer today than it was less than one hundred years ago, when a boy proved himself a man when he could shoulder and share adult hardships, risks, and responsibility working side by side with his father in the fields. By the time he was a seasoned seventeen or eighteen, he was ready to start his own family. A girl became a woman by the time she reached childbearing age; fourteen or fifteen was often considered old enough to marry. The transition from childhood to adulthood was so short that adolescence---at least as the distinct stage of life we now consider it---hardly existed.

Today the traditional determinations of adulthood---the establishment of occupation and family---are routinely postponed until after college. With the period of childhood innocence seeming shorter and shorter, we’ve created a new ten-or-twelve-or-more-years-long designation, a no-man’s land (or no-woman’s land) we term adolescence. Over the past fifty-years or so, this new limbo-land life stage has become an extended period of awkward uncertainty.

We have stretched adolescence further than anytime in history. Any child of any age, with the click of a mouse, can see naked people performing sexual activities of all persuasions, “meet” complete strangers while in their own homes while their parents cross their fingers and hope for the best.

Imagine how it will be for our great-grandchildren.