DOMA and Prop 8. Both History.

[shoju]

A 12 year old girl in Saudi Arabia who marries a 60 year old guy will also tell you she consents. That doesn't make it true or right.

Of course i agree with the fact that the government should be able to tell yay or nay, but: we do agree on something that you should not be able to marry a 12 year old girl right?

We do that because we know that the whole 'consent' issue all boils down to a person testifying that he or she agrees with marrying this person. And we all know that people can be forced (using physical or psychological threats). People in Mormon communities where they practice polygamy have the same mental 'brain-washing' if you want to call it like that. And for that we choose not to agree with polygamy. And yes that is a choice society makes, but it is the same as saying we don't want 12 year old girls to marry. And they are both defendable choices.


A government cannot check every single wedding to see if both partners 'really' consent, but the government can ban certain wedding forms because they are very likely to suffer from huge inequality.
Well probably nowadays the US government CAN know of there is real consent....I mean they are spying on everybody.

You missed a very key word in what most of us are saying.

ADULT

12 years old is not an adult.

Go back and look at my post again,

Frankly, if you are a consenting adult to the relationship

That's the key point, as Jester also pointed out. Those two words (Consenting Adult) do an awful lot of heavy lifting in the debate.