SURVENT

This article on CNN last Thursday has been bugging me.

A 15-year-old girl can enter into a common-law marriage in Colorado, a state appeals court ruled Thursday. Younger girls and boys may also be able to marry.

While the three-judge panel stopped short of setting a specific minimum age for such marriages, it said they could be legal for girls at 12 and boys at 14 under English common law, which Colorado recognizes.

We seem to live in a world where pedophiles run rampant and are seducing our children everywhere, including online. We should be protecting our children in any way possible and by acknowledging a marriage between a minor and an adult does not help it. Granted, the girl who was 15 years old at the time of the "marriage" is now 18 years old, but it does not mean she had the mental capacity to enter into such a committment. Not to mention tha the man she married turned out to be a criminal:

The appeal was filed by Willis Rouse, 38, who is serving time for escape and a parole violation. He argued that he and the girl began living together in April 2002 and applied for a marriage license a year later. The girl had become legally independent by then, but her mother also consented to the marriage and accompanied the girl and Rouse to obtain a license, the ruling said.

I can see it now, our children will get seduced online and run off to one of the 12 states that recognize these types of common-law marriage. They will end up locked into a relationship with a controlling spouse and may be beaten, treated as sex slaves, murdered, or who knows what else. This type of law needs to be removed from the books and no longer allowed to hold true. When the common-law marriage came to be in the mid-1500's, lives were shorter and the world was much different. We are far from those times now and our children need the adults in this country to stand up and begin to show some support for the well-being of these children.

What I would like to see happen is that the marriage be found not valid and then the "husband" be found guilty of statutory rape. She was 15 years old and he was 35 years old, which just does not seem right in my mind.

What are your thoughts? For more information on common-law marriages, check out this link to Wikipedia.