Is she ready? Is she ready? Is she ready?
Mr Let Them Marry, Vaughn Olman, has scrubbed his website since Vyckie blew the whistle on him. Now it has Answers to Your Questions instead.
IMPORTANT ANSWERS
In the past our views have been greatly misrepresented, here we attempt to clarify any misunderstanding and put to rest accusations which have been made against us.
Do you support child marriage? No. Marriage is for men and women not boys and girls.
Well that’s a relief.
Oh wait.
At what age do children become men or women? It varies. Every child matures physically at different rates. Mental, emotional and spiritual maturity vary even more.
Oh. So then you do support child marriage, you just claim you don’t, while reserving the right to decide what a child is.
Isn’t it funny that that’s exactly what Hamza Tzortzis (just for one) says? I bet Mr Letthemmarry would be shocked to be told that. Here’s Hamza saying it:
In England it’s sixteen. In Spain it’s twelve. In Greece it’s thirteen. In some places in America it’s twenty-one. This is the fallacy of secular law. It’s very arbitrary. This is our law: it’s nothing to do with age. Now listen to the principles. Number 1. Is she physically fit? Number 2. Is she emotionally ready? Number 3. Is she mentally ready? Number 4. Is this socially acceptable? Number 5. All these different kinds of principles that we apply. And it happened, that there was an outlier from the statistics that a nine-year-old was physically fit, was mentally ready . . . was . . . given by her own father and the tribe, so we have principles which makes our law far more typist, rather than putting a number, saying, you can do it when you’re sixteen. There are some sixteen-year-olds in this country that can’t even tie their shoelace. The point is: if that’s all you’ve got, a sexed-up view of sharia law, a Fox News narrative, if you study the situation properly it’s based on principles that you apply to different scenarios, and yes, if you apply them properly, the eight-year-old will not get married, because look you’ve damaged her, because the problem I have, is that there is no harming, so there should be no harm. So the point is this is really about sharia law on the basis of [inaudible] things and BBC News and Fox News and god knows what we have.
Back to the Christian version:
What age is too young for a young man or woman to get married? We recommend that a young man or woman wait until the legal age to get married. Even if it was legal we do not believe that children (i.e. not grown men and women) should marry. We choose not to specify a particular age because it varies from person to person.
Yeah. Like Lolita. Remember Lolita? Humbert Humbert told us all about how mature she turned out to be.
IIRC, human brains aren’t mature until 20-22 years of age… Oh look, a review:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16098283
(Unfortunately the full article is behind a paywall, but the reference list should be accessible if anyone wants to look at the original studies.)
Something tells me these people don’t care about actual facts, though.
Longer than that, even; more like 25. (She says without having yet looked at the abstract.)
Only adults should get married!
Like, 10-year-old adults.
I say don’t marry until you’re 40. Have fun until then, if you want kids, have kids, but don’t let anyone tie you down. Then, when you’re 40, you know how great life can be, you may not want to marry at all (I say as someone who did marry at 40, but…it has worked wonderfully).
He is using Newt the Grinch’s tactic of claiming that anyone who quotes him is lying. Brilliant!
“At what age do children become men or women? It varies. Every child matures physically at different rates. Mental, emotional and spiritual maturity vary even more.”
Add greater than or equal to your national age of consent to that.
Am I the only one wondering if, as well as men trying to buy brides for their sons, there would be some using boys as an excuse to try to find themselves a wife (to replace one who maybe divorced him or died in yet another homebirth)?
“This is the fallacy of secular law. It’s very arbitrary.” From a person endorsing Sharia law.
Perhaps the question should be at what age should you be able to force someone else to get married or be in any relationship for that matter.
I’m not entirely sure that it’s possible to cut and paste Hamza Tzortzis statements to those of Let Them Marry.
Islam’s core texts, unlike those of Christiaity, actually do specify an acceptable age for marriage based on Muhammed’s behavior. The prophet married a girl aged six and consummated the marriage when she was nine. The justification is scriptural and abundantly clear.
Christian texts provide no such explicit theological justifications for child marriage.
In fact there’s a stark difference between the two religions with regards to this. In Christianity, Jesus is said to have raised a nine year old girl from the dead. In Islam, Muhammed is said to have pinned down a nine year old girl and raped her.
That said, some Christian sects, like those extreme Mormons, are no better when it comes to underage marriage.
They’re all loony.
Well, it’s deliberately arbitrary. Of *course* it’s arbitrary, that’s the whole point. The point is that nobody can judge who is or isn’t (shudder) “ready” for sex, especially the putative young sex-havers. The arbitrary age is supposed to be a balance between allowing young people to fuck if they want to and protecting those who don’t. It’s not that birthdays are magic, it’s that abuse is already hard enough to categorise, recognise and act upon. So let’s pick an arbitrary age because it makes it far easier to prevent certain kinds of abusive relationship and hopefully to stop abusers doing it again.
The existence of predators and predatory websites that specialise in “barely legal” young people should be all the evidence anyone needs that a more-or-less arbitrary age of consent is necessary.
For ever and ever, proof of the douchery: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://letthemmarry.org/
Just in case you wanted to see, like me.
Wonder how far down “Does she want to get married?” is one the list.