By admin 
California likes to think of itself as the state where the future arrives first. What happens in California often shapes the rest of the nation. So why does the Golden State still allow child marriage?
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A 15-year-old cannot vote, buy a beer, sign a lease, serve on a jury or get a tattoo in this state. But with a parent’s signature and a judge’s approval, they can be married — even to an individual twice their age. More than 8,000 California children — mostly girls — reported that they had been married within the prior year, according to 2021 U.S. Census data analyzed by Unchained at Last, a nonprofit advocacy group.
That may finally change. Assembly Bill 1267, authored by Assemblymembers Diane Dixon, R-Newport Beach; Gail Pellerin, D-Santa Cruz; Cottie Petrie-Norris, D-Irvine; and Sharon Quirk Silva, D-La Palma, would establish the rule most Californians assume already exists: No marriage before 18. No exceptions.
The bill has passed the Assembly and now sits before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It deserves to become law.
The current reality in California is that sex with a child is rape — unless the perpetrator marries the child. A marriage license is, quite literally, a get-out-of-jail-free card for a would-be child rapist. We have built a legal system in which the paperwork that should trigger an investigation instead forecloses one.
This is not California’s first attempt to solve the problem. In 2018, lawmakers congratulated themselves on Senate Bill 273, a “reform” that added procedural safeguards while carefully preserving the practice itself — the legislative equivalent of installing a smoke detector and leaving the fire burning. Bills to set the marriage age at 18 then died in the Legislature in 2023 and again in 2024.
Each failure has left California further behind a growing national consensus that childhood and marriage do not belong in the same sentence.
The opposition to these common-sense bills have remained remarkably consistent: Hypothetically mature teenagers, high school sweethearts, unusual family circumstances. But we do not build child protection laws around extraordinary exceptions. We do not let exceptionally mature 15-year-olds vote or sign binding contracts. Society draws these lines precisely because childhood creates vulnerability. Marriage should be no different.
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Survivors of child marriage, researchers and advocates have documented the same patterns for years such as coercion, family pressure, significant age gaps, religious extremism and pregnancies that adults decide should be “resolved” through a wedding. Child marriage overwhelmingly happens to girls being handed to older men.
It has nothing to do with love and everything to do with power.
Once married, minors are trapped in a legal contradiction. They carry adult responsibilities while lacking adult rights. A married 17-year-old often cannot easily leave home, enter a domestic violence shelter, retain an attorney or file for divorce on her own because she is still, under state law, a child. The United Nations because children cannot give full, free and informed consent.
Seventeen states have now banned child marriage outright, including Oregon and Washington. California is losing in a moral footrace to states like Oklahoma and Missouri.
AB 1267 creates no new program and imposes no new bureaucracy. It simply establishes that adulthood comes before marriage. That should not be controversial, and it should not have taken a decade to decide.
Every year of delay leaves more children at a risk no civilized society should tolerate. California has studied this issue, amended it, softened it and shelved it. The evidence has not changed, and neither should the outcome — just the law.
It’s time for the California Legislature to finish the job. Children belong in classrooms, not wedding announcements.
Kevin Bolling is the executive director of the Secular Student Alliance, a national nonprofit supporting nonreligious students and headquartered in Los Angeles.
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