SubscribeIt's the same reason why you can't vote till you're 18.Yet interestingly enough, if you get a job when you're sixteen and a half years old, you pay taxes. Thus, taxation without representation.
In Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court situates its opinion within the history of laws banning sodomy. Lawrence, however, is also part of another historical narrative: the history of attempts by federal lawmakers and judges to define the relationships among the genus of illicit sex, the genus of licit sex, and marriage. Viewed from this perspective, Lawrence marks the latest intervention in a legal conversation that began when Congress enacted the 1907 Immigration Act and the 1910 Mann Act, each of which prohibited the movement of women across borders—the former, international, the latter, interstate—for “immoral purposes.” In the early twentieth century, through these provisions, lawmakers and judges constructed an isomorphic relationship between marriage/nonmarriage and licit sex/illicit sex. The “marriage cure” transported sex across the illicit/licit divide. But courts and legislators came to view these curative powers as a threat to marriage’s place in the sociolegal order because individuals used marriage as a tool to evade legal penalties. Thus, they checked the powers of the marriage cure and, in so doing, uncoupled both parts of their original isomorphism. Lawrence represents the culmination of this process: the movement of a sexual relationship across the illicit/licit divide at least in part because it made no claim to marriage. This move reflects the persistent status of marriage as simultaneously powerful in its ability to confer legal privileges and to shield people from the dangers of sexual illicitness, and powerless to protect itself from the taint of those same illicit practices.
In India during the 1860’s, marriage meant girls getting married below 8 or 9 years old. Socio-reform religious movements such as the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj pioneered work against child marriage. Late in the 1860’s some success was met when the Indian Penal Code prohibited intercourse with a wife who had not reached ten years of age.But in some places today, things have not changed much. From the United Nations report, State of the World Population 2005 — Child Marriage Factsheet:
Nevertheless, it wasn’t until 1880 that child marriage as a problem became a public issue in India during the debate on the Age of Consent Bill. Towards the end of the debate a child wife of eleven years old, Named Phulmani, died when her husband raped her. More than 500 women doctors sent a memorandum to the Viceroy requesting him to stop marriage of girls below 14 years of age. The resulting bill compromised at 12 years old.
In some countries, more than half of all girls under 18 are married. Specifically, the percentage of girls (aged 15 to 19) married by age 18 is:Should the government or the parents ultimately decide the age of a bride?
• 76 percent in Niger
• 74 per cent in the Democratic Republic of Congo
• 54 per cent in Afghanistan
• 50 per cent in India
• 51 per cent in Bangladesh
While age at marriage is generally increasing, it is not uncommon to find girls married before age 15.
• In Ethiopia and some areas of West Africa, some girls get married as early as age 7.
• In Bangladesh, 45 per cent of young women between 25 and 29 were married by age 15.
• A 1998 survey in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh found that nearly 14 per cent of girls were married between the ages of l0 and 14.
• In Kebbi State of northern Nigeria, the average age of marriage for girls is just over 11 years, compared to a national average of 17.
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posted by Plinko at 9:33 PM on February 7, 2006