A curiosity explored on this blog is that of consistent ethics, specifically the arguments that surround them. I am both confused and drawn to arguments that we could assume require no real measures of persuasion. In walks Wyoming, strong and swaggering, debating HB 7 and the merits of child marriage in the year 2023. I don’t want to talk about the bill at length because none of the debate revolving around HB 7 is political. HB 7, if passed, would establish the marriage age of the state at 16. As of now there is no minimum age. The interest here is in the bills detractors.
Freedom as a concept essentially ensures that you’re going to get people going out of their way to enjoy their personal proclivities. The logic of marriage, at least from the perspective of the conservative, is that it has nothing to do with love. Marriage is first and foremost a property contract entered into mutually by two (legally) people. It’s construct is primarily religious in its history and legal in design. It is not a requirement that anyone get married. There’s no material benefit to it. But, we can argue that marriage is generally defined by the people that engage in it outside of regulatory legal context and so, the benefits may be seen as spiritual and social. The design of a regulatory system though is that of incentive and material benefit. In our present society, we are rewarded for engaging in marriage “correctly”, by which I mean following the law be it social or legal. Such is the nature of structures. We are rewarded for participating in them and generally punished for opting out or reinterpreting them.
The debate around opposition to a child marriage law in Wyoming is more or less a dance of consistent ethics. Formalized ethical ideologies based on fringe viewpoints typically lead you to some weird places. A strictly conservative ethic, applied to questions that govern the lives of individuals, in a society that values freedom above most other things is a tricky thing. First, you can view marriage as strictly a relationship between two people and god. The regulation of which is primarily applied to family life, and all subsequent laws are aimed at protecting and preserving this variant of the institution. Or second, you can view marriage as a legal contract governing property and the protection of such. However, in the instance of Wyoming conservatives the argument looks a bit different.
Conservative advocates of marriage push a specific argument that pregnancy, and consequently parenthood, are pre-political. They are in effect, conditions to be treated as deeply personal and between parents and child. Because this argument necessitates that all pregnancies are consensual (rather, inevitable), it follows that the pre-political view of pregnancy is that it is equivalent to marriage. So, the question of whether children should be able to legally enter marriage contracts becomes complicated in a state like Wyoming.
No, children should not be allowed to get married. But the necessitation of pregnancy being pre-political marriage makes it such that the ethic must be applied consistently. Advocates argue, If a teenager gets pregnant (and the onus of this conundrum is always placed on the female) she is bound by specific moral constraints. The child, although unborn, has a right to both life and to a household with parents. As outlined in Wyoming’s HB 7, parents must be the judge of when their children are entering “properly desired and well-ordered marriages.” The logic of the bill holds that motherhood is a requisite for the maturity of entering into marriage. We generally do not accept that thirteen year olds should marry, however, the act of pregancy satisfies a latent argument in the ethic. If the mother bears a child, she should marry, in order to guarantee a well-ordered marriage.
From a political perspective, marriage as a matter of law is utilized to regulate specific kinds of behavior. Marriage regulates sex, family design, and reproduction. By extension, it is a tool of regulating gender, race, and class. It is an institution we cannot eliminate but merely redefine. If we see it as an institution that is liberal in design, it can be whatever people want it to be within reason. A contract freely entered into between adult individuals as an expression of love, a need to cure loneliness, a way to evade taxes, a way to change their name legally, etc.
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