In 2020, when she was first running for office, Lauren Boebert told the Durango Herald that she wished “more members of Congress had the life experience that I’ve had.” After all, not many Members of Congress can claim they conceived a child with some random guy in the front seat of a pickup truck and then gave birth 9 months later in the seat of the same truck. And most members of Congress unlike Boebert— all of them?— graduated from high school. She was 18 when she got knocked up the first time and dropped out of high school. No one knows who the father is but 3 years later she married a local pervert, Jayson Boebert, who went to jail the same year for pulling out his dick in a bowling alley and waving it at 2 young girls. I think most Members of Congress would pass on living Lauren's experiences.
Her son Tyler, though, at 17, is sharing her lived experiences. He’s about to become a father— making Lauren a 36 year old grandmother, just as her own mom was. He knocked up a 15 year old girl.
Boebert announced that she is going to be a grandmother at CPAC last week, soon after announcing she opposes "comprehensive sex education,” and— since she's basically unschooled— unaware of what sex education is. In this interview, she declares schools shouldn’t be teaching students how to have and enjoy sex, apparently not understanding the role sex education plays in teaching teenagers how to prevent diseases and pregnancies.
She also hailed “rural conservative communities” where teen pregnancies are high because they “value life.” She said that “abortion rates are higher in urban areas, and teen mom rates are higher in rural conservative areas because we understand the preciousness of the life that is about to be born."
Last week, a basically rural conservative state, West Virginia, blocked a change in the state’s marriage laws that allow old men to marry girls even younger than the mother of Boebert’s future grandchild. A bill banning child marriage passed the House of Delegates, with opposition from about a dozen Republican men. When it moved to the state Senate, Republicans killed it in committee. West Virginia has the most child marriages in the U.S.— and almost always old men marrying young girls. Most child marriages are about statutory rapists marrying their victims with parental consent.
Unchained At Last is an organization dedicated to ending forced and child marriage in the US. “Child marriage, or marriage before age 18,” their website explains, “was legal in all 50 U.S. states as of 2017. Thanks to Unchained’s relentless advocacy, that is changing. Delaware and New Jersey in 2018 became the first two states to end this human rights abuse, followed by American Samoa in 2018, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Pennsylvania and Minnesota in 2020, Rhode Island and New York in 2021 and Massachusetts in 2022. However, child marriage remains legal in 43 states and is happening in the U.S. at an alarming rate: Unchained’s groundbreaking research revealed that nearly 300,000 children as young as 10 were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018– mostly girls wed to adult men. Here are the three main reasons we must end child marriage in the U.S.:”
Child marriage can easily be forced marriage. The age of majority, when children become legal adults and get the rights of adulthood, is 18 or higher in every U.S. state. Children who have not yet reached the age of majority have limited legal rights and therefore can easily be forced into marriage or forced to stay in a marriage. Perhaps most shockingly, children typically are not allowed to initiate a legal proceeding– such as seeking a protective order or even filing for divorce– unless they act through a guardian or other representative. This outrageous legal setup puts the “lock” in “wedlock.”
Child marriage destroys nearly every aspect of American children’s lives, including their health, education and economic opportunities. It even undermines their physical safety: Individuals in the U.S. who were married before age 18 report high rates of physical, sexual, financial or emotional abuse during their marriage as well as unwanted or unplanned pregnancies. And the impacts of underage marriage are even more severe for teen mothers. Teen mothers who marry and then divorce are more likely to suffer economic deprivation and instability than teen mothers who stay single– and marriage before age 18 has a 70-80% divorce rate.
Child marriage undermines statutory rape laws. In most states and under federal law, sex with a child that would otherwise be considered rape– in some cases, felony rape– becomes legal within marriage. In those situations, the marriage license becomes a “get out of jail free” card for a child rapist. In some states, statutory rape remains a crime within marriage. The marriage is legal, but sex within the marriage is rape. In those situations, the state that issues the marriage license sends a child home to be raped. At least 60,000 child marriages in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018 occurred at an age or with a spousal age difference that should have been considered a sex crime. Of those child marriages, 88% gave a rapist a “get out of jail free” card, while 12% sent a child home to be raped. Either way, the marriage license made a mockery of statutory rape laws.
Last month, after Wyoming Republicans embarrassed themselves again, the state passed a law forbidding people 15 and younger from getting married. 16 and 17 year olds need parental consent to get married
UPDATE: Grudgingly, West Virginia Passed A Partial Ban
AP reported that “A child marriage bill was passed by the West Virginia Senate on Friday night after it was changed to prohibit anyone younger than 16 from getting married and to ban age gaps of more than four years for 16- and 17-year-olds.”
