When I first began posting articles on a blockchain, most of them were about underage marriage, mainly teenage marriage. The reason that I focused on that topic was because a movement against any adolescent wedding before the age of 18 here in the United States had become noticeable in the public eye.
The main problem that I was having with these same kinds of movements was that the people running them were mostly conspiracy theorists who believed that every 14-year-old girl who got married in the United States was a victim of human trafficking, especially when her spouse was noticeably older than her.
In my writings, I made a number of efforts to dispel those same misconceptions and preconceived notions about teenage marriage and to debunk the misinformation that anti-marriage activists like Fraidy Reiss of Unchained At Last and Jeanne Smoot of the Tahirih Justice Center were spreading all over the nation. I was able to identify holes in their so-called statistics and expert opinions.
This entire mission to outlaw teenagers from wedding before they're legally old enough to vote has gone from bad to worse. Propaganda is everywhere on the Internet, misleading Americans into believing that there is no difference between a scenario in which a 15-year-old girl weds her 23-year-old boyfriend and a scenario in which a 94-year-old man forces a 7-year-old girl into an unwanted marriage that leads to sexual abuse and domestic violence.
The conspiracy theorists opposing teenage marriage have gone as far as lodging unfounded, mendacious allegations of pedophilia against young men who may happen to be on the opposite side of the legal age line from the middle-school- or high-school-aged girls they marry. Meanwhile, American society takes a blind eye to the problem our nation has with deadbeat teenage fathers and underage boys brutally and violently raping pubescent and adolescent girls and even impregnating them.
1. YouTube's Playground For Anti-Teenage-Marriage Propaganda
Not too long ago I came across this one channel on YouTube called "Forgotten Historical Tales." It initially presented itself to me as an educational YouTube channel. However, after I watched this one video from beginning to end about adolescent girls marrying as young as 12 years old, on this same YouTube channel, I realized that it was all puritanical propaganda to demonize teenage marriage needlessly. Below is the one video I saw.
This Video Misconstrues Modern-Day Teenage Marriages As Being No Different From Those Of The Middle Ages
All right. Now, I understand that 12-year-old girls were much smaller and much more frail back in medieval times than they are now. I've only known of one woman who got married at 12 years old, and she was a friend of a friend. She married into wealth, and she did have her happily-ever-after life.
The friend of mine who told me about her best friend getting married at 12 years of age didn't ever tell me how old the young girl's husband was, but it was quite clear that he was not 12 years old or even 13 years old. Nonetheless, the girl did not undergo any form of abuse or exploitation at her husband's hands.
The narrator in the video above misconstrues what a 12-year-old girl is like today by claiming that they still watch Bugs Bunny cartoons. That description of them is so misleading.
These fundamental activists and social-justice warriors who oppose adolescent marriage and teenage marriage will fill people's heads with horror stories and show pictures of 10-year-old girls in hospital beds after their husbands have disfigured them with acid attacks, because they don't want you to see the positive side of any marriage that takes place before 18. They only want you to see the tragic ones so that they can serve their own agenda of outlawing any underage marriage here in the United States.
The prison-industrial complex has a vested interest in these laws passing so that more young men go to prison on frivolous and malicious statutory-rape convictions. In any event, the owner of the above YouTube channel is really comparing apples and oranges when they claim that teenage girls as young as 12 years old getting married today is no less a product of an oppressively misogynistic patriarchy than it was in medieval times. Don't buy into such propaganda, because it's misleading.
Now, don't get me wrong. I do not condone any grown man marrying a 6-year-old girl. However, there is a world of a difference between a scenario of teenage girls getting married to men older than them to live happily ever after and a scenario of actual child molesters wedding prepubescent girls so that they can victimize them sexually.
Self-appointed psychiatrists will tell you otherwise, but they don't care about the truth. Even real psychiatrists have become shady. You only have to watch the video below to know so.
Norman Michael Achin Describes Common Corruption In The Field Of Psychiatry And The Likes
I'm not unaware that some marriages involving teenage girls can be toxic. I have never stated that they are all perfect. However, I cannot understand how puritanical extremists and moralists can run their mouths about how the world owes you nothing, but then, on the other hand, they somehow believe that they have the right to be busybodies with other people's lives whenever an underage teenage bride is involved in the mix. It's like one, big double standard.
This YouTuber who goes by the user name of Forgotten Historical Tales is clearly another troublemaker who wishes to give unlimited power to oppressive police officers and government officials. The reason that there are still jurisdictions here in the United States that allow parental consent and judicial approval for underage marriages is because our statutory-rape laws have become more oppressive than they have ever been.
If you don't believe anything I state herein, then read the online publication titled The Paradox of Statutory Rape by Russell L. Christopher and Kathryn Hope Christopher from beginning to end. YouTuber Forgotten Historical Tales contends that an adolescent's brain is still developing, yet there has been science to debunk it.
It is a misrepresentation of facts for YouTuber Forgotten Historical Tales to conflate child marriage with teenage marriage. The two are separate animals all of their own. Any effort on his part to depict both of them to be identical is pure propaganda. What he gets really wrong is that the statutory age of consent in a given jurisdiction is always identical to the minimum legal marriageable age. It is not!
YouTuber Forgotten Historical Tales claims that UNICEF reported that more than 12 million girls are married before the age of 18 throughout the world each year. I wouldn't doubt that he is accurate with that piece of information, although I do not find any United Nations organization to provide reliable research.
Nevertheless, the elephant in the room here is that nobody is asking the question about how many girls get married before the age of 12 throughout the world each year. That would give you an accurate account of how many real child brides there are in that teenage girls are not really children.
YouTuber Forgotten Historical Tales misuses fear-mongering tactics to scare Americans into believing that there is some kind of crisis in our nation involving forced child marriage, when nothing could be any further from the truth. Put a sock in it, YouTuber Forgotten Historical Tales! I've known of adult men who pay to put their teenage wives through college, so everything involving underage marriage is not the way you portray it to be in your video.
American statutory-rape laws and American sex laws in general have become such a sick joke that people are leaving the United States and renouncing their U.S. citizenship because of it to escape all the lunacies of our broken criminal justice system. Because of oppressive statutory-rape laws and conspiracy theories involving unfounded, mendacious allegations of pedophilia, families are being forced to survive on $11,000 a year here in the so-called land of milk and honey.
The sad part about it is that the husbands and wives in these families started out as a young couple in which both parties were each usually on opposite sides of the legal age line and they became ensnared in a despotic prosecutorial process involving Draconian statutory-rape laws. Idiots like Chris Hansen, Naomi Wolf, Julie Posie, John Walsh, and Revé Walsh support this same upside-down system of justice.
2. Pedophile-Panic Propaganda's Treacherous Role In The Unjust War Against Teenage Marriage
I came across this one online article titled "The Most Bastardized Understanding and Use of Empathy" by Mark B. Bear. Upon reading the first few paragraphs of his article, Mr. Bear impressed upon me as someone who was waging war against puritanical extremism. His educational credentials even seemed quite impressive to me.
Nevertheless, as I read further into that same article, I observed Mr. Bear compromising his goal to attack puritanical extremism when it became very clear that he was the one engaging in puritanical extremism himself. Allow me to elaborate on this point.
Therein Mr. Bear stated:
Pederasty involves a lack of legal consent by the "boy." That being said, the age at which a person can legally consent to such things varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and changes over time. Moreover, "banning child marriage in America [has been] an uphill fight against evangelical pressure." Remember, however, that those children lack the legal consent to marry, which is why their parents or judges must grant the consent. In other words, the evangelical community isn't concerned about the lack of consent when it involves an older man and a child bride. They are concerned about the sexual activity involving a man and a boy. Interestingly enough, however, that's illegal, as is sexual activity involving a man and a girl. The evangelical community enjoys bypassing those laws through child marriage. As such, it's the evangelical community that wants to legalize pedophilia by fighting against banning child marriage. Of course, they want to limit child marriage to preclude it from occurring between a man and a boy, which is fine with me because what normal adult would want to marry a child, let alone have sex with them?
Okay. If Mr. Bear was strictly describing a depraved marriage between an old man and a little girl under the age of 11, I would be completely on board with everything he stated therein. However, after I read the article to which he linked his narrative, I discovered that he was really describing teenage girls marrying outside their peer circles. That is, Joanne Sweeny's article titled "Banning child marriage in America: An uphill fight against evangelical pressure."
I'm not going to comment herein about Ms. Sweeny's above-described article, because it is nothing more than misleading propaganda to demonize all marriages between teenage girls and adult men. Her article necessitates a separate response of mine to it in another article.
I will highlight that Ms. Sweeny presents herself in that same article as another femi-Nazi conspiracy theorist who believes that teenage marriage is somehow a form of child trafficking, when nothing could be any further from the truth.
Nonetheless, in his above-described article, Mr. Bear clearly got the definition of pedophilia wrong. Now, I don't contradict his point about it being unfair that evangelicals oppose gay teenage boys under 18 years of age wedding adult men if it's legal for teenage girls under 18 years of age to wed adult men. He will get no argument from me about that.
My major problem here with Mr. Bear is that therein he equates the wedlock of a teenage girl under 18 years of age with an adult man to a child molester raping and sodomizing a 7-year-old girl. He is completely out of line in doing so.
The fact alone that Mr. Bear accuses these same men who wed teenage girls of being pedophiles is defamatory and mendacious at best. The Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ("DSM-5") specifies that a pedophile is someone 16 years of age or older who is sexually attracted to a prepubescent child (not a teenager) five or more years their junior. What part of that does Mr. Bear not understand?
Mr. Bear attended law school. Therefore, he should know better than to make false statements about pedophilia as he did in his article. He doesn't even need to read the DSM-5 to educate himself on the fact that pedophiles are not sexually attracted to teenage girls. All he has to do is look at the video below and he'll see that he is wrong.
Many Teenage Girls Become Full-Figured Women Before They're Legally Old Enough To Vote
Anyone can see that the teenage models in the video above don't watch Bugs Bunny cartoons or play hopscotch anymore, and they haven't done so in a long time. Teenage boys will gawk at the young girls in the video above, but most of them will not outgrow their attraction to girls that age. Jan Willem-Breure explained all of that in his documentary film titled Are All Men Pedophiles? back upon its release in 2012.
Pedophiles are not watching the video above and gawking at the teenage girls in it. They're too busy getting turned on by watching videos of naked toddlers in bathtubs. To a common pedophile, the teenage girls in the video above look like old ladies who do nothing for them sexually.
Even the comments section to that video is replete with compliments about these young ladies' feminime beauty and genetic gifts. Of course, there are a few semi-illiterates in the comments section to that video who have never taken the time to read the DSM-5 to learn what the exact definition is of pedophilia. Those same two dunces are YouTubers 
YouTuber
YouTuber
In his article, Mr. Bear condemns puritanical extremism, and he preaches about empathetic listening. He is a hypocrite for doing so, because his statement about teenage marriage and the mere fact that he wrongfully conflates it with child marriage demonstrates how much of a puritanical extremist he is and that he is not into empathetic listening at all.
Mr. Bear has obviously never met a couple whose marriage started out in which the wife was younger than 18 years old and the husband was an adult man over the age of 21. Otherwise, he would not have spewed all of this nonsensical pedophile-panic propaganda of his in his article.
When a 22-year-old man marries a 14- or 15-year-old girl, he doesn't do it with the sole purpose of having legal sexual relations with her and circumventing the statutory-rape laws. He does it, because he wants a future with her and vice versa. To believe otherwise only shows that Mr. Bear has as much of a twisted one-track mind as all the femi-Nazi conspiracy theorists do. He gets me furious.
Now, when an adult man does marry a teenage girl below the statutory age of consent in his jurisdiction, he should be legally allowed to have sexual intercourse with her inasmuch as the government is giving such marriage their blessing. It doesn't mean that he's going to be able to have legal sexual relations with other girls his wife's age; and he shouldn't do so anyhow, because he is married.
Mr. Bear appears to believe that teenage marriage gives adult men the legal right to become fornication machines with underage girls, but it doesn't. It merely grants that couple the legal right to consummate their matrimonial union, and it has absolutely nothing to do with pedophilia.
So many years ago I once met a 25-year-old woman named Starr who had gotten married at the age of 14 to a 24-year-old man inasmuch as she was pregnant and she and her then-husband wanted to give their baby a promising future. I'm not doubting that they wanted to keep the criminal justice system out of the picture. What good would an arrest and an unwanted statutory-rape trial have done either one of them?
Starr's marriage to a man ten years her senior didn't last forever. Then again, over 50 percent of marriages end in divorce here in the United States. She remained friends with her baby's father.
A co-worker of mine named Beatriz once told me that when her parents got married, her mother was 14 years old and her father was 26 years old. By then, her parents had been happily married for over four decades.
When I was in college, I became good friends with this college freshman named Bobby. He revealed to me that when his parents got married, his mother was 15 years old and his father was 22 years old. Bobby told me that his father was a good parent.
Now if Mr. Bear wants to accuse all three men in the above-described scenario of being some kind of high-functioning pedophiles, I will never agree with him inasmuch as he could not be any more wrong than he could ever be. However, I will stress this point to him.
Whatever he desires to call these three above-described adult men who married their wives when their wives were minors, there is no way that Mr. Bear could ever convince me that these men are no better people than the late John Couey, Donald James Smith, Jesse Timmendequas, Joseph Duncan III, and the late Kenneth Parnell, just to name a handful of dangerous child molesters. I won't even make such a comparison out of respect for the three above-described men who married teenage girls.
I don't deny that there are adult men who do terrible things to pubescent and adolescent girls. The late Ariel Castro, Brian David Mitchell, and Phillip Garrido make very good examples in that regard. However, the above-described men who wedded teenage female minors have never had anything to do with those same three hardened criminals. To believe so is utter hysteria within the American Court of Public Opinion.
If Mr. Bear is reading my article here, he's probably going to come back at me and ask, "Well, what if a man over 40 years old wants to marry a 13- or 14-year-old girl?" Okay, Mr. Bear. That's a fair question, so I will answer it.
In my article titled “The Great American Controversy Over Underage Marriage,” I described an interview that Karen Tolkkinen held with a 34-year-old Alabama woman back in 2003 for an article regarding underage marriage in the Mobile Register.
This same 34-year-old Alabama woman was married to a 63-year-old man, and she had been so for 20 years, which placed her at 14 years old and her husband at 43 years old back in 1983 when they first got married. According to this Alabama woman, her husband was monogamous and faithful to her.
This same 34-year-old Alabama woman stated that her husband was a good husband to her and a good father to their four kids. In other words, he showed absolutely no characteristics of a pedophile, which he wouldn’t be anyhow, or a sexual predator.
This woman's husband was obviously not someone who would have gone hanging out with weirdos like Jack McClellan or Phillip Greaves, and he definitely would never have marched side by side with them in a pedophile pride parade in the streets of New York City, if there were such a thing. The only complaint that this 34-year-old Alabama woman had about her marriage and her husband was that she resented how others treated her and her family disparately and even meddled into their personal business.
Mr. Bear obviously has it in his mind that if an adult man over 21 years old falls in love with an adolescent girl as young as 13 or 14 years of age, marries her, and builds a future with her, then somewhere down the line he's going to kidnap a 3-year-old toddler and perform cunnilingus on her. Mr. Bear needs to clean up his mind before he attempts to tell others how to live their lives.
It outrages me that certain elected officials will make sustained efforts to ban teenage marriage in their respective jurisdictions based upon unfounded allegations of "legalized pedophilia" here in the United States, but then, on the other hand, you have a situation with the late 13-year-old Aubreigh Wyatt who fell victim to a brutal and violent rape from a boy the same age as her and this punk has not been arrested to this very day.
If you're not familiar with the matter of the late Aubreigh Wyatt, watch the video below. This is a case in which both society and the law failed this 13-year-old girl insofar as it led her to taking her own life.
Carlee Gifford Describes The Tragic Events That Led Up To The Late Aubreigh Wyatt's Suicide
Somehow these narrow-minded legislators here in the United States will get up on their moral high horses about a 24-year-old man marrying a 14-year-old girl out of love and demonize him in every way possible, but they don't seem to have any problem with underage boys brutally and violently raping adolescent girls as young as 12 years of age. It brings to mind that in Mississippi where the late Ms. Wyatt's tragedy took place, a girl can get married at 13 years old if she goes through the proper channels.
Well, what I don't find very fair is that there are self-righteous do-gooders in office who want to pass laws in Mississippi so that a 13-year-old girl cannot get married under any circumstances in that same state in fear that the husband might be significantly older than her. They don't want a 13-year-old girl entering into a cross-generational marriage in that state, but those same people don't seem to have any problem with a 12- or 13-year-old boy violently raping a girl that young with impunity.
It goes to show you how dense in the head these idiots in office are and that they obviously don't have the American people's best interest at heart, and they don't care about young children or teenagers. They're only on a mission to force others to live in their make-believe world of age-appropriate perfection and wholesome purity.
Mississippi goes by English Common Law to determine the age floor for minors to get married, which is a minimum age of 12 years old for girls and 14 years old for boys. In view of the points I cite above, there is a reason for the English Common Law; and it's to give adolescents and teenagers agency to decide how young or how old they wish to enter into a marriage.
Now, if Mr. Bear disapproves of an adult man having sexual intercourse with a 14-year-old girl, then I must respect his opinion in that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. However, a 14-year-old girl is considered to be a consenting adult in nations like Germany, Austria, Portugal, Bulgaria, Italy, Colombia, and Brazil, just to name a handful of such nations. Therefore, all the lawmakers in these same nations cannot agree with Mr. Bear's school of thought.
Nevertheless, in his article, Mr. Bear claims that he educates and helps people to better understand biases, their impact, and how to keep them in check; when, in reality, he is the most biased and bigoted individual I have ever encountered on the Internet. At the end of the day, he has no right to preach what he does not practice, and the contents of his article are no exception to that rule of thumb.
Ladies and gentlemen? Because dogmatic individuals like Mr. Bear are gaining traction in influencing elected officials to pass laws that go against our interests, we all need to be prepared to vote a defendant "not guilty" whenever we are summoned as jurors to frivolous and malicious statutory-rape trials here in the United States. It's getting to the point that jury nullification may be the only weapon we have against frivolous and malicious statutory-rape laws.
The so-called crime of "statutory rape" should not be a strict-liability offense except in cases of victims under 11 years of age. It should be an intent offense instead if the alleged victim is an adolescent or older. An alleged victim of "statutory rape" should have to right to refuse to participate in a statutory-rape investigation or trial without the threat of criminal prosecution.
The sex-offender registry needs either to be restricted to physically violent offenders or eliminated altogether. When a man gets into trouble with the law inasmuch as he and his significant other are each on opposite sides of the legal age line and his significant other later on marries him, his name and personal information should not continue to remain on the sex-offender registry and place his and his significant other's children into danger while they're living at home.
Elected officials who oppose teenage marriage will brag that they're child advocates. However, none of them ever do anything to abolish parental testamentary freedom, so they must not care very much about the safety and best interests of minors who fall victim to any kind of abuse.
What it all boils down to is that our society is becoming a prison-loving culture that believes that massive incarceration will purify the very fabric of society. Reality has it that nations with high numbers of imprisoned people are disasters waiting to happen.
Why do adult men fall in love with teenage girls who are not yet legally old enough to vote? There is no one-size-fits-all answer to that question despite what Mr. Bear may contend. In any event, it does no justice to anyone for Mr. Bear and others like him to confuse pedophilia with nostalgia. The two have nothing to do with each other.
If a 29-year-old man finds a 15-year-old girl to be attractive inasmuch as he missed out on the teen dating scene when he was in high school himself, it doesn't mean that he is going to pose a danger to that girl in any manner. In fact, if he is inexperienced with relationships, he may even be vulnerable to that girl's sexual advances. If she's a nice girl, she won't do anything to get him into trouble with the law.
Of course, you can't give that explanation to Mr. Bear without him gaslighting you. He doesn't want anyone questioning the status quo whenever it comes to our nation's broken statutory-rape laws.
In his article, Mr. Bear runs his mouth about critical thinking. However, the fact alone that he considers a marriage between an adult man and a teenage girl less than 18 years old to be legalized pedophilia shows you how incapable he is of critical thinking. At the end of the day, Mr. Bear is an imposter.
3. Final Thoughts
Mark B. Bear is a lawyer who specializes in family law out in California. My question is if someone like Matthew Koso came to him for legal representation, would Mr. Bear agree to let him retain him? Probably not. His ego and his dogma would stand in the way.
In case you don't know who Matthew Koso is, he's a military veteran who married a 14-year-old girl named Crystal Guyer when he was 22 years old. She was pregnant with his baby at the time that he married her.
There are too many self-righteous do-gooders in American society who believe that they're serving some kind of divine purpose whenever they get a law passed to stop a teenage girl from marrying the adult father of her unborn baby. They absolutely love to see the baby's father sent to prison on a frivolous and malicious statutory-rape conviction. They have no mercy for the young girl when a social services agency wrongfully takes her baby away from her and she never sees it again.
It is time that the American people stand up against these special-interest groups that are misusing the sex laws, the marriage laws, and the legislative process involving juvenile-justice-related matters to sabotage the lives of innocent people who don't deserve such tyranny. We can do our part by voting elected officials out of office who conform to the whims of troublemakers like Fraidy Reiss, Jeanne Smoot, and Mr. Bear.
Do not trust any propaganda that these people throw at you. Do your own research, and you will find that much of what they claim to report regarding underage marriage and their perception of pedophilia are fear-mongering tactics to get you to succumb to their agenda. We are smarter than that. What they are doing is promoting fake pedophilia in the form of conspiracy theories and masking it as social justice.
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