Again, Kentucky has been unlucky. When state lawmakers tried to raise the legal age of marriage from just 16 to 18 years old, they were unfairly maligned for allegedly doing the exact opposite.
“Kentucky’s ‘child bride’ bill stalls as groups fight to let 13-year-olds wed,” a local USA Today affiliate first reported. “Anti-Child Bride Bill Stalls in Kentucky,” Newsweek subsequently blared. And of course, Twitter exploded with takes about those knuckle-dragging, banjo-playing, cousin-marrying, inbred mountain people.
But those reports were false, and now the nation owes the good people of Kentucky an apology.
The chairman of the Kentucky Senate Judiciary Committee, State Sen. Whitney Westerfield, did his best to set the record straight and to undo the viral accusations.
While everyone on Twitter was calling people names yesterday I was working with stakeholders on @jrajra’s SB48 (which I fully support as-filed) and I plan to hold a called meeting of my committee to hear it sooner so we can pass it and get it to the House ASAP!
— Whitney Westerfield (@KyWhitney) March 3, 2018
There isn’t. The ridiculousness being spread across twitter is amazing. No one has asked for 13yo’s to be able to marry (and I wouldn’t support it if they did). All groups I’ve spoken to agree there should be a minimum age put in place.
— Whitney Westerfield (@KyWhitney) March 3, 2018
No one was in favor of letting 13-year-olds get married, Westerfield tried to explain. Instead, and as Linda Blackford at the Lexington Herald-Leader reported, the delay was the result of lobbying to add more protections, not less.
That effort was led by the Family Foundation who pushed to delay passage of the bill only because they were concerned that it could be misconstrued to allow a judge to marry off a 17-year-old without parental consent.
“We were for everything in the bill except for excluding parents in the marriage of a 17-year-old,” senior foundation policy analyst Martin Cothran told the Herald-Leader, “and suddenly [people assume] we’re for 13-year-old marriage.”
Under the initial legislation, a judge could legally give away a 17-year-old after a quick background check to ensure the older party doesn’t have a history of domestic abuse and isn’t registered on sex offender registries. A revised version of the bill includes those provisions, but adds also a requirement that a parent of the minor would have to give consent.
That bill is expected to pass. Hopefully, it will help extinguish the media brushfire that swept over the Bluegrass state.
