The GOP answer to 10 -year-old girls forced to give birth is ... child marriage ...

 

Wyoming Republicans are losing their minds over a bill that would RAISE the marriage age to ... sixteen?!

Think I'm kidding?

The Wyoming Republican Party, however, is urging its constituents to oppose it not because the bill is too weak, but because it believed the bill stood to rob their constituents of constitutional rights...

Part of this reticence, it appears, comes from the religious group Wyoming Family Watch, which seems to have issued marching orders to those it helped elect:

Among other points, the letter argued that preventing children under 16 years old from marrying "denies the fundamental purpose of marriage," robbing teen parents from the ability to remain together under one roof for any children they might bear together—even though nothing in state law would prevent those children from co-parenting.

"Since young men and women may be physically capable of begetting and bearing children prior to the age of 16, marriage MUST remain open to them for the sake of those children," the post read. "The sad fact that physical maturity often does not match emotional and intellectual maturity is an indictment of our modern educational system. That is a problem that should be addressed. But we should not use it as an excuse to instantiate bad law."

In related news, Tennessee Republicans barely missed completely eliminating ANY age requirements for marriage.

Suddenly the absolute insistence on forced birth for 10 year olds begins to make a lot more (disturbing) sense.

Arranged and forced child marriages are far less common in the United States than you'd probably like to believe. According to World Population Review:

U.S. Child Marriage Facts

In the U.S., about 200,000 minors have married between 2000 and 2015. Of the 200,000 child marriages: 67% of the children were 17, 29% of the children were 16, 4% of the children were 15, less than 1% of children were 14 or under, and there were 51 cases of 13-year-olds getting married and 6 cases were of 12-year-olds. According to the Pew Research Center, child marriage is more common in the southern United States, including the states of West Virginia, Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina. California and Nevada have high incidences of child marriage as well.

Some extreme cases of child marriage in the U.S. are:

• In 2010 in Idaho, a 65-year-old man married a 17-year-old girl
• In Alabama, a 74-year-old man married a 14-year-old girl
• In Tennessee, three 10-year-old girls married men ages 24, 25, and 31, respectively.
• The youngest boy to marry was an 11-year-old who married a 27-year-old woman in Tennessee in 2006

Looking at this, and keeping in mind general GOP support for maintaining (and even expanding) child marriage in America, it becomes evident that they've got a damn troublesome definition of "grooming" if this isn't included in it.

(Child marriage is completely prohibited by law in Delaware, by the way -- one of only four states.)

There is one major private organization out there fighting against the forced and arranged marriages of children in the United States: Unchained at Last.