Sometimes the facts on the ground don’t change, but attitudes toward them do.
In Oregon witness this session’s Senate Bill 548., which has just passed the Senate with just one vote in dissent, and now heads to the Oregon House.
It concerns the youngest age at which two people can be married, which at present in Oregon is 17. The bill would change that to 18.
An organization called Unchained at Last, which focuses on forced and child marriages and which has weighed in supporting the new bill, said that from 2000 to 2018 about 200,000 people – mainly girls – were married, most of them 16 or 17 but some as young as 10 years old.
It estimates the number for Oregon at 3,891, about midway among the states per capita. (The number in Idaho, with less than half of Oregon’s population, is 5,160, the second-0highest per-capita rate in the nation after Nevada.) No minimum age at all is specified in California. Oregon is one of nine states with the limit at 17, and would be one of just nine – Washington being one – set at 18.
This is a trend line with a long reach. Back in colonial days, the typical marriage age for females was 12 and for males 14. That has adjusted very gradually over time, but only recently as a serious push for ending the practice really gotten under way. Legal ages for other things – voting, drinking, serving in the military, signing contracts and more – mostly have coalesced about age 18 (drinking being a relatively recent exception to that trend). But in many places, marriage can be carried out at younger ages, And states generally give full faith and credit to marriages from other jurisdictions.
Unchained pitched three core arguments against it:
1. Can easily be forced marriage, since minors have limited legal rights with which to escape an unwanted marriage (typically they are not even allowed to file for divorce);
2. Is a human rights abuse that produces devastating, lifelong repercussions for American girls, destroying their health, education, economic opportunities and quality of life; and
3. Undermines statutory rape laws, often covering up what would otherwise be considered a sex crime. Some 60,000 marriages since 2000 occurred at an age or spousal age difference that should have been considered a sex crime.
There are elements of perspective and culture in this (which doesn’t constitute an argument against).
And the breadth of change seems broad. The backers of the new Oregon bill are bipartisan, including Representative Kevin Mannix of Salem, Senator. David Brock Smith of Port Orford and Senator Janeen Sollman of Hillsboro – two Republicans and a Democrat, respectively. And as noted, only one senator voted against it on the floor.
Committee testimony was unified as well, with 18 people submitting statements in favor and none against.
What once seemed clear and obvious enough in one direction has shifted. Progress can happen.
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