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RE: Effort To End Child Marriages In California Receives Backlash

in #life7 years ago (edited)

tbg1972? Well, if you're talking about 8- and 9-year-old girls being forced to wed much older men, then I'm on board with you. However, if you're talking about a 14- or 15-year-old pregnant girl marrying the 20-something-year-old father of her baby, then I wholeheartedly have to disagree with you and this is where you and I part ways on this issue. In fact, whenever a teenage female minor marries her over-18 baby daddy, one of the main objectives in that action of theirs usually appears to be that they seek to disassociate themselves from the pedophile subculture, for a lack of a better term, as much as possible. This same fact was clearly seen in the interview that 20/20 did with Matt Koso and Crystal Guyer Koso back in 2005 when Matt Koso emphatically stressed to the news reporter that he was not a pedophile and wanted nothing to do with those people. If you review the actual definition of pedophilia in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), you will find that it has absolutely nothing to do with teenage marriage regardless of whether such a marriage is intragenerational or intergenerational. It is no secret that our nation has among the most Draconian age-of-consent laws of any country in the world, and yet the proponents of a solid marriageable age of 18 years old want to give nothing in return for their insistence that their efforts be made into law. For example, why can't they at least ask for a provision in the law to give an adolescent girl legal immunity against contempt-of-court charges if she refuses to testify against her older boyfriend in a statutory rape case in which she is alleged to be the "victim" and she sees the prosecution's efforts as nothing but a witch hunt? The proponents of these laws simply want their cake and eat it too to such an extent that they're not even willing to see anything outside their bubble, and they won't even as so much allow for any middle ground between them and the opponents of such laws. I say that if such a law is going to affect many people, it should be the decision of the voters rather than the state legislators on whether it should even exist. If proponents of these laws believe that it has so much support, then they have nothing to worry about if it gets presented as a proposition on California's next ballot instead of it being left to the state legislators to decide its fate.