The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Marriages for minor girls show how times changed
Legislation pending in the General Assembly to forbid people under 18 from marrying shows how times have changed in Connecticut.
Fifty years ago Connecticut probate courts often approved the marriages of men in their 20s or older to girls 16 and younger for a purpose that now seems quaint — to hold the men to account for the statutory rape by which they had impregnated the girls and to protect the girls and their children.
The courts figured that it was better to give a pregnant minor girl a husband bound by law to support her and their child and to give their child a father in the home than to put the man in jail, opportunistic as he had been.
Then the Supreme Court proclaimed the era of abortion, in which older men still impregnate minor girls but can arrange to get rid of the problem without the girls’ parents and law enforcement ever finding out. This has been made easier in Connecticut by the state’s refusal to enact a parental notification law, a refusal grounded in the belief that abortion is the highest social good, higher even than deterring child rape.
So today the problem Connecticut sees with minor girls marrying is the practice of arranged marriages involving men from Middle Eastern cultures who have immigrated to this state. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone in authority that this problem results from uncontrolled immigration — from the failure of the federal government to enforce any immigration law and to analyze immigrants individually for pernicious cultural and political inclinations.
Connecticut’s political class applauds this failure and wants it made permanent because requiring immigrants to meet any qualifications is considered “discrimination,” and of course it is. But what is wrong with discrimination against the oppression of women and against the fascism, theocracy and barbarism that come with it? *** QUID TUA MEA?: State Sen. Ted Kennedy Jr., D-Branford, would bring the intrusiveness of government to new heights with his legislation to register every driver’s license holder as an organ donor unless a licensee files an objection.
Kennedy means to address the long waiting list of afflicted people needing donation of one organ or another. But the arrogant presumption he proposes to put into law is hardly the only way of increasing organ donations. Publicity campaigns could be attempted, as with leaflets about organ donation inserted into license and auto registration renewal mailings from the state Department of Motor Vehicles.
More or less compelling people to become organ donors will just breed suspicion of and resistance to government instead of encouraging generosity and altruism. If Kennedy’s legislation is enacted, Connecticut might as well change its motto from “Qui transtulit sustinet” (“Who transplanted sustains”) to “Quid tua mea” (“What’s yours is mine”) — if the Democratic Party hasn’t already copyrighted it. *** VICIOUSNESS IS ENOUGH: That white students from Canton High School taunted black and Latino players from Hartford’s Classical Magnet School at a basketball game last month by chanting “Trump! Trump! Trump!” doesn’t make the president racist, as much as his critics pretend it does.
The chanting doesn’t even make the chanters racist, since, while they may be, they also may have been responding mainly to Connecticut’s politically correct atmosphere, which insists that members of racial and ethnic minorities should hate Trump.
What the chanting showed for sure was hardly news at all — that kids are vicious and hateful brats as often as they are good sports, and that politics can be just another mechanism of their viciousness. Letters to the Editor: Email editor@registercitizen.com or mail to Letters to the Editor, The Register Citizen, 59 Field St., Torrington, CT 06790; ATT: Letter to the Editor. Rules for getting published: Please include your address and a daytime phone number for verification purposes only. Please limit your letters to 300 words per Letter to the Editor and one letter every fifteen days. We reserve the right to edit for length, grammar, spelling and objectionable content. Talk with us online: Find us at Facebook.com/registercitizen and twitter.com/registercitizen. For the latest local coverage, including breaking news, slideshows, videos, polls and more, visit www.registercitizen.com. Check out our blogs at www. registercitizen.com/blogs/opinion.