Eighteen means eighteen
Colorado still writes exceptions into its child-marriage law. Here is what those exceptions actually permit, and why closing them is the first thing I would change.
There is a version of this argument that gets told in statistics, and there is a version that gets told in people. I want to tell the second one, because the first one lets everybody off the hook.
A law that carries an exception is a law with a door in it. Most people never see the door. The people who go looking for it are rarely looking for something good. That is the whole case, and it does not need to be more complicated than that.
When I say eighteen means eighteen, I am not making a clever point. I am saying that the age we picked for every other adult decision — signing a lease, taking on debt, enlisting — should be the age we picked for this one too. You cannot rent an apartment but you can be married into one. That is not a tradition worth protecting.
The objection I hear most is that these cases are rare. Rare is not the same as acceptable. We do not leave a gap in a law because only a few people fall through it. We close it because the few are children, and because closing it costs the rest of us nothing at all.
So that is where I start. Not with a slogan, and not with a promise I am not in a position to make. Just with a line that should not have exceptions written into it.
