After living for eight years in Alabama, I’ve heard more than my fair share of jokes about that state being the best place to marry your 14-year-old cousin. Turns out folks from North Carolina didn’t have much room to talk, according to a report from the Associated Press.
That’s because our state is one of only 13 that allow children under age 16 to wed, according to Unchained at Last, a nonprofit organization that advocates ending child and forced marriages in the United States. Nine of those states have no set minimum age, relying instead on case law or a judge’s ruling.
Under current North Carolina law, children as young as 14 can get married if they become pregnant and a judge allows it. Otherwise, children can wed at 16 with parental permission. Alaska is the only other state that by law allows marriages as young as 14.
Thankfully, North Carolina’s dubious reputation may be coming to an end. State legislators are nearing passage of a bill that would raise the minimum marriage age from 14 to 16 and limit the age difference between a 16-year-old and their spouse to four years.
“We will have moved the needle and made North Carolina no longer at the very bottom of the barrel of states,” Drew Reisinger, register of deeds in Buncombe County, told the AP. However, “we’re still going to be putting a lot of children in harm’s way.”
This issue is of particular interest to Reisinger because he said two-thirds of the marriage applications in Buncombe County last year were filed by non-residents seeking to marry an underage person. Alas, change has always come slow in North Carolina, where some lawmakers remain convinced that certain marriages involving a child are still acceptable.
“It’s a generational divide,” Sen. Vickie Sawyer (R-Davidson County) told the AP. “It was older members – both Democrat and Republicans – who had those personal stories of family members who had been married and it turned out OK.”
Sawyer sponsored a bill that would have raised the age to 18. Instead, a compromise measure that won unanimous support from the Senate in May and the House last week would raise the minimum marriage age to 16 with no exceptions, including pregnancy. And even those 16 or 17 would need parental permission or a judge’s decision that the marriage would “serve the best interest of an underage party.”
This is not some Romeo-and-Juliet scenario of two 17-year-olds who just can’t wait to be with each other. These are older people, who may have manipulated a young person into making a lifelong commitment when they’re barely out of puberty, bringing a child to Asheville to get married because their own state was too smart to let it happen there.
A study by the International Center for Research on Women estimates that nearly 8,800 minors under 18 were listed on marriage licenses in North Carolina from 2000-15. An astonishing 93 percent of the marriage applications it reviewed from 2000-19 involved a marriage between a minor and an adult.
Just because something was OK once upon time doesn’t make it right today. The General Assembly should pass this bill, then work toward making North Carolina’s minimums marriage age 18. I know there are always exceptions to the rule, but if you’re not old enough to vote or join the military, you probably shouldn’t be getting married.