Underage marriage is ahborrent. Any paedophilia is abhorrent. Any who support paedophilia must be terrible people.
No respectable adult should care about plyngy, polyandry, or polygamy amongst consenting adults.
Abusing, however, the children is outside the pale.
agreed Jake....pedophiles (real ones,not suspected ones)should taken out back and shot....
Well.. Actually, people were considered full adults back in the days, at about the time that they reached puberty. They would get married and be encouraged to have children, so that they would have a big family who could take care of them when they got too old to work the fields.
Since the industrial revolution, and the emergence of all this great electricity and technology to speed up the process of manufacturing and farming, children are not needed as much as they were before, to work. This is what brought people to see that children should not be working- it was suddenly dangerous to them, because they were not just picking harvests, or using hand tools to plow, and what have you- they were operating heavy machinery, and such.
While children may be physically capable of operating these machines, they are generally not mature enough to be able to properly communicate, and have language handicaps because they usually do not have as large of a vocabulary bank as adults do..
Anyways, this all lead to people noticing that children should not work..
However, the mid 1800's saw changes in marital age of consent.. from 10 to 16, in most cases, and 12 states did not change their minimum age of consent from 10 to an older age, until the 1930s.
Oh and regarding polygamy- King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines..
1 Kings 11:3
The Koran limits wives to 4.
Oh and it should also be said that epileptics were denied marriage licenses for fear that they would pass the disease to their children. Those laws were not wiped out completely until 1976.
Here is a whole site to edumacate yourselves on the history of marriage and marital laws, and all the dumb superstitious religious shit that went with it..
Partners Task Force - Marriage Traditions in Various Times and Cultures
