Link: https://hoodline.com/2026/08/california-senate-votes-38-0-to-finally-close-child-marriage-loophole/

California is currently one of only three states in the country — alongside Mississippi and New Mexico — that sets no minimum age at all for marriage, allowing a child of any age to be legally wed as long as a parent or guardian signs off. A bill designed to close that loophole for good just cleared a major hurdle in Sacramento, passing the state Senate on a unanimous 38-0 vote this past Wednesday.

About fucking time. Fucking fundie Christians marrying children off to grown pedos.

It's good that it's closed, but I wonder how much this loophole was actually used.

2026, California bans child marriage.

Glad they got that squared away.

mentioned in the article:

An analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by the advocacy organization Unchained At Last estimated that roughly 35,000 minors were married in California between 2000 and 2021, with the vast majority of those cases involving underage girls wed to adult men, the same report notes.

That's horrible

Make a list and throw these dudes in jail

Women are nothing but objects with slight monetary value according to them!

Oklahoma closed theirs this year. They were one of four with no statutory minimum. See: Unchained at Last.

Child marriage is still legal in 33 states, and I'll let you guess as to those states' political leanings.

If you guessed Republican, the party whose elected representatives boast a higher rate of sex crimes against children than the trans people they tell us to hate... congrats!

The survivor website Unchained At Last tells us:

Between 2000 and 2021, nearly 315,000 children were legally entered into marriage across the U.S. The vast majority [86%] were girls wed to adult men.

9 out of the 10 states with the highest teen pregnancy rates are also, you guessed it...

Is Newsom going to veto this one, too?

Women, and girls, are objects to these people. Some try to dress it up by treating a woman like a prized horse in Kentucky, maybe even chandeliers in her barn, but that’s as far as it goes.

We’re not people, and sometimes don’t get to be kids, with this subset of humanity.

Sick. Twisted. The fall of Roe is a push for more of that.

Article says 35k but the quote from the website they used says 315k
https://www.unchainedatlast.org/united-states-child-marriage-problem-study-findings-through-2021/

It took until 2006 for Washington to ban beastiality and only after a Boeing engineer let a horse diddle him and he died from a burst colon.

He's basically a republican, so it would make sense.

Woof.

They’re scrambling to close a loophole that allows outrageous financial aide and scholarships for parents who wed their children before college.

It's not just fundie Christians, unfortunately. Way too many cultures do this, religious or otherwise.

Horrible at scale

It wouldn't be surprising to me if California or NYC ends up being the new capitals of a refreshed America. They still have sane leaders who aren't bankrupt in all the ways.

allowing a child of any age to be legally wed as long as a parent or guardian signs off.

Then it goes before a judge who has to agree to it. I don't know about y'all's courthouse's, but the judges in the county I grew up in were having none of that shit every time I found out about teenagers trying to get married

I'll tell you this: hate is hate. You can flavor it any way you want. Everybody hates someone. Ukrainians hate Russians, Zionists hate Palestinians, and so on.

You can call the hate righteous or predatory. You can lynch a Black man because you're white, or you can support putting a rapist and murderer in the gas chamber because of what he did. However you justify it, hate is still hate.

But as soon as you say something as dumb as this followed by the bandwagon, you're no different from the people you're condemning. You're just as pitiful as the pedophile, just as contemptuous as the racist, and just as ignorant as the person you're calling an idiot.

So don't go thinking you're somehow high and mighty simply because you believe your hate is purer than everyone else's.

Disclaimer: I do not support sexual crimes or abuse of any kind, nor do I support MAGA, Republican extremism, or religious fundamentalism.

Ya... That video made the rounds right along with two girls one cup and one man one jar.

I didn’t know there was a video!

lol. No.

Being mad about child rape is actually not the same as child rape.

This isn’t even punishing the child rapists, and you’re still mad. It’s just taking away the legal avenue to rape children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Ya that's not what you're mad at.

You're making an all-encompassing declarative statement insinuating that fundamentalist Christians are marrying off their children to grown pedophiles. That is a hateful generalization supported by literally no actual facts. You're doing the exact same thing as someone claiming that drag queens, as a group, are sexualizing children.

And before you put your thumbs to the screen, yes, I realize there have been isolated incidents of this happening. Crimes happen across the board, and they deserve to be investigated and punished by the law. That's not the issue here. The issue is that you're using an isolated subject to justify what is ultimately a hateful generalization about a particular group of people. That's prejudice and hateful, regardless of which group you're directing it toward.

And your link is totally irrelevant in this case. It is obvious that you did not catch on to what I was saying.

Well, I guess that means my next vacation spot changes to Mississippi (females can marry at 15 with no age gap limits) or Oklahoma (children of any age can be married with a court order).

... to go to next and protest so they do the same thing. Change their laws.

Siri, look up the average cost to bribe a judge to let you marry a kid in Oklaho oh no is voice to text is still on fuc

I would strongly disagree. All mainstream religions condemn pedophilia. In fact, Christianity in particular was instrumental in the shift of social attitudes against child marriage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purity_movement (along with other things such as contraception, pornography, and prostitution, among a broader movement that opposed alcohol and slavery). It would be fair to point out that one might not give it too much credit as everybody was Christian at the time.

Not everyone supports a zero-exception approach. ACLU California Action has emerged as the primary organization opposing AB 1267, arguing in committee filings that an absolute prohibition unduly infringes on fundamental marriage rights and risks driving minors in difficult domestic situations further underground, KFI AM 640 reported. The group has historically resisted total bans on the grounds that they could disempower mature minors or pregnant teenagers navigating already complicated circumstances.

what‽

that's the American Civil Liberties Union! it's the biggest progressive advocacy group!

yes, the article says the bill was amended to make "any minor marriage performed on or after January 1, 2027, [] legally prohibited but voidable at the option of the person who married as a minor, rather than automatically void" to address those concerns, but:

1. the article also says there was a 2018 attempt with similar opposition and I doubt nobody thought of this solution then, so I don't think this solution quelled the opposition
2. that seems to defeat the point where enacting a ban instead of the 2018 watered-down act's mandated counseling would ban forced marriage! if the marriage becomes null then the parents would know the minor reported it, no?

WHAT THE FUCK yet you point fingers at countries like Iran for similar shit.

The problem is being actively fixed. Better than leaving legacy law on the books

Okay okay, message received. I’ll just stick to being upset at fundamentalist Christians for indoctrinating children, inhibiting their ability to develop critical thinking skills, sowing hatred and fear, and for holding disproportionate power in politics that drags back science and cultural progress for everyone.

The problem is that it is ALWAYS YOU PEOPLE.

Every great aspect of western civilization had been people FLEEING religious persecution, from mostly abrahamic religions LIKE YOURS.

Whenever people want people to be equal, abrahamic religions are there to support child rape and subjugating women.

Whenever people want to advance medicine and science, abrahamic religions are there to burn whoever they deem a "heretic".

Whenever people want to be happy with who they are and marry who they want, abrahamic religions are there to get in the way of that as well.

Everything we have that is good for everyone, is in SPITE of your primitive and hateful religion.

My point is that you can't use the same kind of hate to prop up your own narrative while condemning someone else's. Saying that fundamentalist Christians are giving their children in marriage to pedophiles is an untrue, sweeping statement.

And that's not even what he was saying. You're making up a position for him to support your own argument, much like the people you apparently criticize for doing the exact same thing you're doing right now.

Like mine? I'm a human secularist and antitheist. I stand opposed to all organized religion.

My God, I haven't seen a comment this full of itself and spoken this far out of someone's ass in a long time. You've made massive assumptions that I specifically disclaimed against in my original comment. I don't support Christian fundamentalism; I would actually protest against it. What I don't do is blindly hate it like you and apparently the person I was responding to.

Did you actually read what I wrote, or did you already have something you wanted to say regardless of whether it was true? You know, the exact same problem you're accusing others of having while doing it yourself.

Now that's FAFO

This is lemmy and you're voice of reason. Expect to be down voted into oblivion for thought crime

Honestly I'm surprised West Virginia isn't on that list

O for sure. But sometimes people need push back. One day someone will read this and see that not everyone will accept things like this at face value. So I know I'll be downvoted to hell.

But as they say in the business there's no such thing as bad publicity.

I’m not the OP, I’m not the one talking about child-marriage. Thus why I’m basing my distaste for fundies on the things I said above.

And yet your rhetoric, argument, and general attitude is identical to op.

I know that you're not op.

Raping your spouse wasn't a crime anywhere in the country until 1975, and wasn't illegal nationwide until 1993.

It was also much harder to get a divorce. So men could rape their wives without legal repercussions and the wives couldn't get a divorce.

Of course.

But JESUS how has nobody tackled this already?...

It's not "blind hate" when I specifically listed the reasons throughout history.

Your self-righteous, and wannabe victimization is so played out that no one will tolerate this bullshit anymore.

For you to be correct, Christians would have to either be too stupid to think about what they support, or so evil that they always support oppressing people. Which is it?

It isn't a problem there (since they are all family, everyone gets along). /s

there's no way of knowing how many people where "believers", or just went along out of fear.

That is the point of my last sentence. I definitely agree that Christianity has a highly imperialist legacy, but in areas ravished by capitalism instead of colonists, it provides some moral code against endless exploits. Should people be able to find morals and mutual aid without this crutch? Yes, but this provides quite some existing organization against chaos. Karl Marx has a few words on this as well. I agree it’s no good where it does not belong but this article is about California.

It’s additionally imperialistic to let imperialists generalize to our own religions. I believe I should have the right to make Zongzi and maybe fly a kite with my children on Duanwu.

I don't know if you actually understand the definitions of the words you're using. Nothing I said was self-righteous. I'm not victimizing myself, nor am I playing the victim. I haven't claimed that anyone in this situation is a victim, either. I also haven't made any claims about being right or wrong, so I'm not sure what, exactly, you're implying I need to be "correct" about in the first place.

Dude, are you actually reading what I'm saying? Did you miss the part where I explicitly said I'm an human secularist and anti-theist? I stand against organized religion.

And once again, you're making sweeping statements about Christians as a whole, as though every single Christian on the planet is somehow evil simply because they participate in an organized religion. That's an indefensible declarative statement. Can you actually prove to me that all Christians are evil? And no, you can't just point to terrible things Christianity has done throughout history and use that as evidence. Christianity as an organized religion, and what you're primarily referring to, which is more accurately Catholicism in many historical contexts, is not synonymous with every modern Christian or every Protestant denomination.

I don't blindly hate. I have very concrete reasons for opposing organized religion. Organized religion can indoctrinate children, intentionally muddy or distort the truth to serve political interests, perpetually seek more money and influence, manipulate politics to advance its own agenda, and, at its extreme, cause profound harm and even death.

But what I don't do is make idiotic, sweeping declarative statements like, "Christians are grooming their children to give them to pedophiles." That's ridiculous. Nobody is doing that as some universal Christian practice. There may have been isolated cases where something remotely resembling that happened, and those individuals should have been prosecuted for what they did. But you don't get to take isolated criminal acts and pretend they represent every Christian on the planet.

That's the distinction I'm making: I can have a strong, principled opposition to organized religion without blindly assigning the worst possible motives or behavior to every individual who happens to be religious.