Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In some places in Mexico, kids as young as 12 can marry. In Canada, it's 16. In many places and cultures, wide age differences are viewed as acceptable. Not sure why you think it's a "southern" or religious thing.

It is both a southern thing, and fundamentalist Christianity thing. Of course, most fundamentalist Christianity is in the south. That is a fact.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2017/11/child-brides-teenage-sluts-and-roy-moore.html

I grew up in rural SC as a baptist and now live in rural Georgia (did a 15 year DC stint). In all my 25 years of rural southern living, I can think of NO example of grown men “courting” teenagers. Some teens married (17, 16 maybe) but they married another teen. In fact, most fathers would kill a man who tried to court their 14 year old DD. It just is not common. It is not a southern thing. It’s as rare as Duggar families.
My AL native DH was as shocked as I was to hear about Roy Moore and some Christians who supported him.

Just to drop my .02 in...

Most women marry men 2-8 years older than them. If we set aside the 14-year-old in this case, and consider the rest, we are looking at women in their late teens and early twenties. This is when the man was in his early thirties. I don't know that there is much of a difference between eight and ten years when it comes to differences in a couple. Also I think the ages of the two parties play in. A 20-year-old dating a 30-year-old seems a bit odd. A 30-year-old dating a 40-year-old seems less odd. Maybe it has to do with maturity?

In any case, I am from a conservative Christian background. It isn't not uncommon in our community for 30something-year-old men to marry younger women, but the women are usually 24+. Overalll it doesn't seem to lead to the crazy patriarchal abuse people fear, but maybe I'm biased.

Anonymous wrote:In some places in Mexico, kids as young as 12 can marry. In Canada, it's 16. In many places and cultures, wide age differences are viewed as acceptable. Not sure why you think it's a "southern" or religious thing.

It is both a southern thing, and fundamentalist Christianity thing. Of course, most fundamentalist Christianity is in the south. That is a fact.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2017/11/child-brides-teenage-sluts-and-roy-moore.html

Read Homeschoolers Anonymous. It will enlighten you.

Anyone on the extremes is dangerous

Vast vast majority of Christians get it

The election is unfortunatly a binary choice. Jones is an extreme abortion on dmand candidate. Both of them are unworthy.

I was brought up in fundamentalist schools and churches. The statements by the preachers seemed similar to many I heard saying that women were responsible for their own sexual assaults because they were too flirty/sexy/whatever. Women were subjugated, and at fault for anything sexual. If there was a pregnancy, it was the woman’s fault for seducing the man.

There was also a lot of rhetoric about being God’s army and needing to stand up for their side. The focus on “us vs them” was disturbing. I’ve noticed the same beliefs in people on the far ends of the political spectrum. Dehumanizing the “enemy” was shockingly common. I guess they never noticed the red words in the Bible.

This is a better study, PP, because it doesn't rely on self-reporting, which Pew admits is probably an issue in the case of child marriage.

http://apps.frontline.org/child-marriage-by-the-numbers/

If you go by county courthouse records rather than self-reporting, then 87% of child marriages are girls.

If you look at the data, the very youngest girls are all marrying adult men. So, the 10 year-olds granted marriage licenses in Tennessee were marrying men 25+

Similarly, 86% of child marriages were to adults, rather than to other children.

OP here. Turns out I was wrong. Teen marriage (15-17 year olds) is very rare in all the US. Turns out CA and TX have higher rates of teen marriage than AL. Also, seems like teen marriage is 55% girls and 45% boys so these young marriages could be primarily happening between young people and not necessarily young girls with older men. They don't break it out by religion, but at something like 5 in 1000, it is clearly not a broadly accepted practice.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/01/child-marriage-is-rare-in-the-u-s-though-this-varies-by-state/

This isn't exactly a peer reviewed study, but it fits with my experience growing up in a cloistered conservative community. Men were marriageable when they had a stable job, but women were marriageable as soon as they menstruated and could take care of a home.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/roy-moore-evangelicalism_us_5a05f4f8e4b0e37d2f37573d

"Courtship, as it’s practiced in some fundamentalist communities, is a way for Christian parents to help arrange their children’s marriages, vet potential partners and make sure their children end up in happy and godly relationships.

Field describes courtship in fundamentalist churches as a process directed by men. The process varies in different communities and from family to family, but it tends to follow a basic pattern. A man is considered ready for marriage when he has a stable source of income, and perhaps his own home ? essentially, when he is able to financially support a family. A woman, meanwhile, is considered ready when she is able to have children and take care of a household."

I grew up in a rural area in the South and this was not at ALL prevalent in my community. People married young there but they tended to marry within a few years of each other's ages. But this article in the LA Times is very eye-opening about how prevalent it is in some southern religious communities. Completely skeeves me out with the whole premise of control over women...

http://beta.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-brightbill-roy-moore-evangelical-culture-20171110-story.html