Oh dude. DUDE DUE DUDE. You are so fucking far off the mark here, I need to drop out of "Fuck-off the Internet Weekend" to come in and smash your faith in humanity with a hammer.

The reason child marriage is legal in Kentucky has very little to do with having sex with kids. We are talking way the hell more sinister. You see, these laws allowing parents to marry off a child have little to do with the child's welfare and everything to do with saving the honor and 'face' as it were of mom and dad. So your 11 year old gets raped, and Jesus don't have none of that abortion with our little miracle, so you marry off the kid to its rapist to raise the child Yup. That is why this law exists, and why it is so hard to change it.

When she was a scrawny 11-year-old, Sherry Johnson found out one day that she was about to be married to a 20-year-old member of her church who had raped her.

“It was forced on me,” she recalls. She had become pregnant, she says, and child welfare authorities were investigating — so her family and church officials decided the simplest way to avoid a messy criminal case was to organize a wedding.

Yup, that is a thing, in modern America, in the lifetime of most of the people on this website. Marrying off children is also an easy way to get rid of an extra mouth to feed in the poor parts of the world. They started dating shortly after she returned home to Laurel County, Kentucky. Her mother, Pollard recalled, was anxious to get her out of the house and would drive Pollard to meet her boyfriend. And with her mother’s permission, 16-year-old Pollard soon found herself at the county clerk’s office, marriage certificate in hand.

I cannot find it now, but there was a story 2-3 years ago where a 'pastor' in a small church used sex with his kids as a way to lure men to come to his congregation. When the kids got knocked up, he married them off. The one girl was 13.

This shit is foul, vile, evil. We don't let 16 year olds sign economic contracts for a reason; at 16 your window of "long term consequences" is a month. Maybe six weeks for the smart ones. Pregnant at 13? fuck it, let em sign a life altering contract that will define them for as long as they live.