How Republicans Became the Party of Child Labor and Child Marriage

How can the GOP keep a straight face when it sermonizes about Our Kids?

Carroll Baker and Eli Wallach in the Elia Kazan-Tennessee Williams film Baby Doll (1956)

Seven years ago a guy walked into a pizza joint in my neighborhood with a loaded assault rifle because alt-right conspiracy theorists had told him Democratic Party leaders were running a pedophile ring in its basement. I’m obliged to inform you that this wasn’t true; the pizza parlor doesn’t even have a basement. And also that wielding an assault rifle is no way to settle political differences. Still, if this person had wanted to protest sex with underage girls in more responsible fashion, he’d have done better to picket the Republican National Committee.

My latest, in the New Republic, is about the bizarre fight Republicans are waging in state legislatures against proposed laws banning child marriage, defined as marriage before age 18. Nearly 300,000 minor children (almost all girls, of course) were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018, some as young as 10. About 20 percent of these were below the age of consent in the state where the marriage was recorded. This is, among other things, an epidemic of legally sanctioned pedophilia. The U.S. is trying to meet a 2030 goal set by the United Nations to ban child marriage worldwide. In the U.S., marriageable age is set at the state level, and 43 states allow child marriage, seven with no minimum age at all. We’ve seen some progress in recent years passing state bans on child marriage, but we probably won’t meet the 2030 deadline because many Republican legislators oppose these bills. In effect, the GOP has positioned itself as party of both child labor (see my earlier New Republic story about Republican efforts to decriminalize that) and child marriage. You can read my new piece here.

Earlier this week, I wrote about Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s rapid fall from grace as a result of the banking scandal. He’ll be answering questions about that today at 2:30 p.m. when he announces the latest interest-rate hike. In the meantime, you can read my piece about the Fed’s regulatory blunders.