California bans child marriage, a practice still legal in 32 US states | Hacker News Reader

California bans child marriage, a practice still legal in 32 US states

bbc.com

67 pointsdabinat108 comments

Campaigners always use examples of old men marrying young girls but that’s not common at all.

96% of children getting married were 16 or 17, and 85% of the adults marrying those children were 18-23. Not quite the horror show that campaigners push.

I agree that no one under 18 should be getting married, I just question their tactics.

So your concern is that the marketing of a child marriage ban shows the p95 outcome, not the p50?

Weird.

It's clear to most people that a marriage between someone 50 and someone 14 is a serious power imbalance, coercive beyond the younger person's ability to consent, and nearly everyone in our society thinks it seems gross and wrong. But as far as I can tell such marriages have not been happening in California. Prior to the new law, the consent of the parents and a judge was required.

(Personally I think a marriage between someone 50 and someone 18 still seems bad. But the way our legal system works, once someone is 18 anything goes.)

It's less clear that a marriage between a 17-year-old and a 16-year-old or between a 19-year-old and a 17-year-old is inherently problematic. If, for example, the woman of such a couple gets pregnant, being married could give helpful legal protection/advantage, since most of our laws are written around the default expectation of married parents.

According to a news article from a few years ago, groups opposing a previous ban on child marriages in California included the ACLU (who claimed that it "unnecessarily and unduly intrudes on the fundamental right of marriage without sufficient cause") and Planned Parenthood (who said the law should "not impede on the reproductive rights of minors and their ability to decide what is best for them, their health and their lives").

A law saying 18 is minimum marriage age (pretty much all across the world), is simpler to implement that

Marriage OK if (p1>18 && p2 > 18) || (p1>16 && p2 <20) || (p1>17 && p2 <22) ..

Marriage is a civil institution that provides social advantages, and waiting till 18 isn't really a burden for a 16 and 19yo that want to get married, and get those benefits.

> but that’s not common at all

No one is saying it's common. They're saying it shouldn't happen at all.

Yeah, I also question the distinction between a 17 year old marrying a 50 year old and an 18 year old marrying a 50 year old. Does your judgement suddenly magically get better after you turn 18?

you have to draw the line somewhere, and 18 (or 21) is a common place to draw the line.

At 18, you magically become fully legally responsible for your actions, while at 17 years 11 months 25 days of age much of the responsibility rests on your parents.

Yes because the alternative, letting humans use squishy subjective judgement, is too easily abused and subject to corruption.

> In the state, there had been no legal age to wed, allowing children to get married as long as their parents consent and a judge signs off on the nuptials.

> There was also no mechanism for people under 18 to get divorced and many girls say they were trapped in abusive and predatory relationships.

Call me misguided, but I don't necessarily see 16 year old and 20 year getting married as equally problematic as the provided examples of 30+ year age gaps.

I think the real issue people are dancing around right now culturally is that these extreme age gap relationships are beginning to make everyone feel very uncomfortable. The difference between a 17 year old and and 18 year old doesn't make them feel less gross and exploitative.

You can drive a car at 15-16 most states, which puts other people's lives in your hands. You can get married between 16 and 18 depending on the state. You can join the army, take on debt, and do pornography at 18, all three of which will completely alter your life long term. You can drink, buy a gun, or enter a casino at 21. These feel someone nonsensically ordered to me. Seems like we should just pick one age for "you can now make and be responsible for your decisions" and stop talking about all of these weird edge cases as if we need the law to deal with all of them.

I mean, most of the world has settled on 18 for this.

FWIW the situation in the UK, that the BBC doesn’t mention, is similarly muddy.

In England and Wales, since 2022, the minimum age is 18. Previously it was 16 with parental consent, which is the situation in (the rather more religious) Northern Ireland.

In Scotland the age is 16 and parental consent is not required.

So, well into the 20th century young English couples would flee across the border and get married there; most famously at Gretna Green, a town just inside the border.

Scottish marriages involving English/Welsh people under 18 are now not legal.

how does that protect 18yr olds from being forced into marriage? a 16yr old can not consent but an 18yr old can? i was hardly any smarter at 18 than i was at 16. in my opinion the problem is not the consent or lack thereof, or the age, the problem is the inability legally or maturity wise, to say "no".

with the right culture and support there is nothing wrong with getting married early.

the problem comes from arranged marriages, especially if there is a large age difference.

instead of setting a minimum age, which does not help much, it should be easier to refuse, and even if agreed, it should be possible for anyone under say 25 to simply have a marriage annulled or a divorce if there are obvious problems (such as the age difference).

but if both are young, then marrying young has its benefits. the younger we are the more adaptable we are, and that helps to build a relationship and makes it easier to get along.

the idea that we should be fully matured adults before getting married doesn't actually work, because living together is part of the process of maturing, and the older you are the more difficult is it to develop certain skills and attitudes that you need for a successful marriage.

in china, people get married much earlier than in the west, but they also have strong family and social support for doing so.

You can’t enter into other contracts until 18 so why was marriage an exception?

I get your point (and I agree), but technically the parents sign the contract.

Weird

Not true, you can certainly enter into military service contracts and student debt obligations! And unlike marriage, there is no easy way to dissolve those.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/499...

The Findings section has a long, detailed list of child marriage harm. In short, preventing marriage before 18 provides for immense harm reduction in the aggregate and improved odds of life success. I’d push the age to 21 if I could. Rental car companies always had it right to restrict rentals to <25 age cohort due to frontal lobe development timeline.

(The US allows student debt and military obligations at an age when this cohort is vulnerable to systemically exploit young people, these should not be used as examples imho)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31590741/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3621648/

You assume harm reduction is everyone's goal. Some people just want to fuck young girls. Many of the current political party in power included. It's pervasive. Just grab them by the pussy and no one takes the victims seriously. If you go after them for their many crimes it's "lawfare".

Oh no, I agree there are predators out there everywhere and support anything that protects people from them. My comment tone is intentionally academic, as well as facts and evidence based.

(I am also a small annual donor to the non profit performing this state by state advocacy work, no other affiliation)

People under 18 can enter into contracts for "the necessities of life".

The specific age will always be controversial because laws require specificity but social norms are varied. (Quantum levels vs continuous functions.)

In some societies it's okay to marry 6-year-old girls.

Slightly more rational societies link it to puberty in the female. Indeed, their leaders have written entire books to justify such behaviour.

still legal in 32 states, and Scotland and Northern Ireland, BBC

Non paywalled article

https://calmatters.org/politics/2026/09/child-marriage-ban-n...

> But a report by the International Center for Research on Women found that teenage girls who are married are more likely to live in poverty, more likely to drop out of high school and more likely to develop diabetes or cancer.

Such a study needs thorough review for confounders, and direction of causation.

https://archive.is/VKoo5

There is an argument that people should marry when they are (*both*) younger. More time to be fruitful and multiply. More time together, instead of encouraging high "body counts" and high-risk behavior. Delaying marriage is not as altruistic as it sounds.

It also results in people who get to raise kids while having zero adult life experience.

I mean, if people are supposedly "getting high body counts" without, would it really make a difference how often that occurs?

Call me misguided, but I’m not sure adult life experience helps a lot with raising kids. It just means you grow out of touch.

It does help. Older parents tend to have better mechanisms for coping with stress, and are less likely to physically abuse their kids, as just two examples.

You’re gonna be out of touch with your kids’ generation basically no matter what.

33 year old with a kid due in a few months time:

I would not want 23 year old me raising a child, I was way too status and money obsessed then and could not provide my son with the model of what I personally deem a good man.

My wife had (too) young parents and it left lasting damage, they dragged her into interpersonal spats and their worries about money before she had the tools to properly process it.

The question is if that has gotten better over time? Because age doesn’t really change all that much in my experience.

At least for me it did, 10 years ago I was in the first year of my career so all I wanted was to climb, with no regard of what bridges need burning to make that happen. I'm now at a stage where I have is less to prove so those toxic traits have faded.

My Wifes parents on the other hand might not have grown up but on the other hand they would have divorced way sooner without a child forcing them to stay together

but then it's not the age that made the difference, but the focus in your life. you had other interests, and that also told you that it's not the right time for you to have children. not everyone has the same focus at 23. i wasn't interested in getting married at 23 either. but other people are. did your wife's parents want to have children that early, or was that unplanned? you don't need to answer, but i think that question makes a difference. i don't believe people chose to have children if they don't feel ready for it.

In my mind age and this shift in focus are at least somewhat linked. 23 year old me would be pissed at 30 year old me for not moving to a FAANG company and instead focus on marriage, those 7 years did teach me a lot of important things about myself and the world.

My Wife comes from a country where getting married and having kids before the age of 20 was very much the norm at the time, which led to a lot of people having children at a time where they were not ready for that responsibility.

would you mind sharing the country/culture? as i said elsewhere, in china people also marry and have children young, and they are ready. but they also have a lot of support from their parents and society. young couples normally live with their parents who help them raise the children and run the household, allowing the young couple to learn but also focus on work and career.

This would be Romania, specifically shortly before and during the fall of communism, there were all kinds of weird incentives in place to encourage the birth rate, for example military engineers (like my FIL) where able to get out of deployment to rural infrastructure projects if they had a (pregnant) wife or a newborn. So a good chunk of his unit had children in a span of give or take 4 months, which coincidentally was about a year after an upcoming deployment to build a dam in a godforsaken area of the country was announced.

30 year old me looks back at 20 year old me and wishes he had known better. 40 year old me looks back at 30 year old me and wishes he had known better. 50 year old me looks back at 40 year old me and wishes he had known better. 60 year old me looks back at 50 year old me and wishes he had known better.

I believe generally most people do grow and mature over time. Sometimes it's not that obvious externally or even internally without reflection, but it's a natural part of aging IMHO.

i think its the sex part that results in kids, not the marriage part.

22 of these are "red" states: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North + South Carolina, North + South Dakota, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

6 more are blue-leaning "purple": Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico and Wisconsin.

Only four are "blue": California (ban coming into effect 2027 as per article), Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland.

I don't understand why the ban cannot come into effect immediately. Like, wouldn't want to spoil someone's child marriage plans in the next year or so because it would be rude?

> I don't understand why the ban cannot come into effect immediately.

This is the default in Californias constitution:

> Except as provided in paragraphs (2) and (3) of this subdivision [Article 4, section 8], a statute enacted at a regular session shall go into effect on January 1 next following a 90-day period from the date of enactment of the statute.

There are additional legislative hurdles to enact legislation faster than that.

Kentucky had a bill up for vote this year, passed the senate but died in the house. One of the lawmakers specifically amended it to exempt cases where the child is pregnant.

As in, it’s fine to marry if the child is pregnant, or the opposite?

Let me describe a few ways why child marriage should be prohibited without any exceptions anywhere:

1. When a minor marries someone of age, their spouse becomes their legal guardian until they become of age (or become emancipated, which is a difficult process generally). Why is that an issue? Well, in abuse situations, it can be incredibly hard for the minor to leave their spouse who is their legal guardian. It's not much different to runaway children being returned to their parents, even when their parents are the source of the abuse. Certain states are worse for this than others, so called "reunification states" where they will absolutely try and return you to your legal guardian unless there's clear and convincing evidence why they shouldn't;

2. A lot of child marriages happen so an adult can escape a statutory rape or rape charge as prosecutors don't tend to prosecute when it's a spouse. It should be noted that spousal rape only became a crime in all 50 states of the US around 2005 (IIRC) and this only really picked up steam around 1990 or so;

3. Because of this lack of power, it creates a whole host of other problems, such as exploitation to the point of trafficking.

Politically, preserving child marriage is a uniquely Republican issue [1].

[1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/repu...

When a minor marries someone of age, their spouse becomes their legal guardian until they become of age (or become emancipated, which is a difficult process generally).

that sounds totally wrong. not as in you are wrong, but as in this reality is bad. apparently, according to wikipedia at least in some US states, marriage automatically emancipates a minor, but not in massachusetts.

https://unchainedatlast.org/

Goes without saying nobody should be married before they're 18 (or probably 25, for that matter, but that's another story), but it seems performative and disingenuous to call this 'child marriage'. A child is a person who hasn't yet reached puberty - clearly that isn't applicable to, say, a 17 year old.

It would be more accurate (but of course garner less headlines) to say California has made it unlawful for a minor to get married.

Also see the technical definition of child here: https://archive.org/details/mosbysdictionary09edunse/page/34...

This pits the developmental/medical definition against legal status. Nevertheless, under the technical definition a child is necessarily a minor but not every minor is a child.

Thus, saying that California banned minors from being married would cover both cases accurately and be less clickbait-worthy, while saying 'California bans child marriage' is not fully accurate because it doesn't convey the full extent of the ban (viz., minors).

As a side note in the legal profession when discussing wills and estates the term 'minor children' is used for a reason.

No, it wouldn’t. The youngest known girl to give birth was 5 years old. Was she, in your opinion, a child?

Not it wouldn't what?

EDIT: Can't reply: 'You're posting too fast'

Be more accurate.

Considering...

> In the state, there had been no legal age to wed, allowing children to get married as long as their parents consent and a judge signs off on the nuptials.

I don't even think the headline was sensationalist.

My point was that saying 'California bans child marriage' is less accurate than 'California bans minors from being able to wed', since the latter (arguably) encompasses a larger group of people. I don't think most people consider a 16 or 17 year old a child in the way a 5 or 8 year old is a child. Put another way, an 8 year old girl being forcibly married to, say, a 30 year old man (as happens in certain places in the world) is, I would put to you, much more offensive and viscerally disgusting than a 17 year old girl being married. Neither should be lawful, but child marriage conjures up images of actual children, surely.

> I don't think most people consider a 16 or 17 year old a child in the way a 5 or 8 year old is a child.

Did you read the article? There was no minimum age before this bill, so yes, they banned child marriage (by all definitions of it).

> In the state, there had been no legal age to wed, allowing children to get married as long as their parents consent and a judge signs off on the nuptials.

> A child is a person who hasn't yet reached puberty - clearly that isn't applicable to, say, a 17 year old.

This is incorrect. According to UNICEF, "a child is any person under the age of 18." [1]

> California has made it unlawful for a minor to get married.

There was no minimum age limit in California before this bill.

[1] https://www.unicef.org/child-rights-convention/convention-te...

Circumcision next?

Male genital mutilation

It was legal in the first place?

> a practice still legal in 32 states

The headline says yes. The article says paywall.

Yes technically allowed with parental consent and judicial approval. Not sure how often it happened.

In California, around 9,000 a year according to the article

Ban is under age 18. Many states allow 16 & 17 with parents permission.

California had/has until jan 1 no minimum age. But it requires judicial approval.

As long as your definition of "child" is any person who is not yet legally an adult.

It's really adolescent marriage (the threshold was moved from 16 to 18). Teenage marriages were still fairly common in the West in the first half of the 20th century. Vatican City had a minimum age of 12 on the books until 2013.

Europe is now more or less consistently 18 for parental consent, but marriages at a younger age are still permitted across the EU with judicial consent.

What they mean is the ability to marry at 16. It's not exactly a small child age, it's teen age.

I suspect that this norm lingers from times of stricter social norms and before the pill, when a marriage would be a way to avoid a scandal when the prospective bride were pregnant.

i don't think it had anything to do with lack of birthcontrol or fear of scandals, but rather with the religious definition of a marriageable age. there is also is also the biological definition which would make you marriageable as soon as you are able to conceive. but it is worth noting that apparently in the 19th century girls average age for puberty was 15 and for boys it was 17.

Still allowed at age 16 in Alabama.

Roll tide...... I guess....

I hate to upend your "lulz red states" Reddit zinger, but the fact is the law doesn't take effect until January 2027, so until such time there is NO age limit in California.

The limit is 16 in Colorado and Illinois, 15 in Hawaii, and no limit in New Mexico.

Might want to update your notes.

It wasn't mean to be a "lol red state" thing, for instance, California law still allows first cousins to marry. What in tarnation.

Yikes.

Bizarrely, the map for cousin marriage is roughly the inverse of the age map, with it being permitted on most of the East coast, CA, CO, NM, AK, & HI.

I have a personal theory that making first or second cousin marriage illegal would result in a great deal of complaining and likely legal challenges from certain groups that they're being discriminated against on the basis of racial/ethnic origin. Take a look at a global map of the percentage prevalence of first-cousin marriage.

I say this having discussed the phenomenon with friends who immigrated from Pakistan and all of whom have met first-cousin married couples that had one or more children with birth defects or mental disabilities that could very well have been the result of it.

If you immigrate to the US, there is an expectation you leave any barbaric (by American standards) practices home.

For example, dog meat is still legal in South Korea (until 2027), but trying that here would not be acceptable nor would any reasonable person think it's discrimination.

In case you're curious. The ten states with the highest rate of child marriage per capita between 2000 and 2021 were:

  * Nevada
  * Idaho
  * Utah
  * Kentucky
  * Wyoming
  * West Virginia
  * Alabama
  * Mississippi
  * Tennessee
  * Texas

It's interesting when states like California decide that those under 18 are too young to make a decision on marriage, but old enough to decide that they want to have sex change surgery.

It seems like you would come to the same conclusion on the question of "how old you have to be before you can make your own decisions" on both issues.

>but old enough to decide that they want to have sex change surgery.

an under-18 can not unilaterally decide to get sex change surgery in california.

How about puberty blockers?

Should people who are still legally defined as children be allowed to make a decision on those?

>How about puberty blockers?

an under-18 can not unilaterally decide to go on puberty blockers either.

If a parent can't give consent for marriage, they shouldn't be able to consent to gender-affirming care, right?

> The California Department of Health Care Services, a branch of Newsom’s administration, said Friday that state dollars will be used to reimburse providers of gender-affirming care for youth covered by Medi-Cal, the state version of Medicaid...

Gender-affirming care includes medical treatments that help align a person’s physical characteristics with their gender identity. Care typically begins with therapy and may progress to puberty-blocking medicine and hormone treatments, and in rare cases for adolescents, surgeries.

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2026/09/29/california-to-fund-...

>If a parent can't give consent for marriage, they shouldn't be able to consent to gender-affirming care, right?

my comment was about you incorrectly saying minors can "decide that they want to have sex change surgery" (later changed to puberty blockers), which they cannot just decide to do.

I'm not fully on-board with trans ideas, but here's a stab at an argument: Marriage is not, I don't know, "romance-affirming care." That's the difference. It is not considered critical to a young person's identity to be married, while gender-affirming care is.

> states like California decide that those under 18 are too young to make a decision on marriage, but old enough to decide that they want to have sex change surgery.

I don’t think this is factually accurate.

Sex-reassignment surgery (or whatever we are calling it these days) requires parental consent in California if the person seeking it is a minor.

> Sex-reassignment surgery (or whatever we are calling it these days) requires parental consent in California if the person seeking it is a minor.

So why shouldn't you be allowed to get married with parental consent in the same state?

I'm OK with a state deciding it either way, but I'm looking for a little consistency.

>I'm OK with a state deciding it either way, but I'm looking for a little consistency.

If that's your true intent, what specific problem do you have with this surgery? If it's not with this specific surgery, what other types of surgery do you think we should ban for minors "for a little consistency"?

You can always divorce someone or otherwise dissolve the marriage.

It's hard to reattach body parts once they've been removed.

One is permanently life-altering, while the other amounts to paperwork.

Did you respond to the right comment? Because this isn't relevant to what I said. I wasn't being rhetorical. I was asking specifically where people think the line should be. Which surgeries should be allowed for minors and which shouldn't? Should we permit cheiloplasty? How about rhinoplasty?

I was responding to someone "looking for a little consistency", so I'm asking some questions in that same spirit.

>So why shouldn't you be allowed to get married with parental consent in the same state?

>I'm OK with a state deciding it either way, but I'm looking for a little consistency.

I'm not Californian, but in most democracies things default to "legal" until there's explicitly a law passed against it, or if a broad concept is already illegal then edge cases default to "illegal" until a specific exemption law is passed. In general, parental consent is required for all medical procedures performed on a minor, so I would hazard a guess that:

a) sex reassignment surgery on a minor falls under the broader category of "medical procedures you have to get parental consent for"

b) somebody was sufficiently bothered by the previous state of affairs with regards to minors getting married and the potential for harm[0] that they passed a law against it, but no such explicit ban has been passed for minors seeking sex reassignment surgery (yet?).

To me that seems wholly consistent with basic common sense, plus laws are notorious for lagging behind the times.

>I'm OK with a state deciding it either way, but I'm looking for a little consistency.

Why is consistency (parental consent vs not) in this matter this so important to you?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49917494

Because if they’re marrying someone older that person legally becomes their guardian and there is a massive power imbalance. Marriages with minors often involve abuse because it’s difficult for the minor to leave a legal bond to their guardian.

Gender-reassignment surgery is more self-contained as it only involves one person.

I don't get how child marriage can be legal. Like, yeah, they get permission from their parents. But does the fact that they're married negate other laws??? I mean, it's still rape. It's still like child abuse. Does marriage = emancipation?

>I mean, it's still rape.

im not in support of under-18s getting married, but, what?

Never heard of age of consent laws/statutory rape?

Yes, and the laws around that align with marriage laws, so it's still a confusing statement.

if its not statutory rape before they get married, it doesn't suddenly become it afterwards.

and, as far as i am aware, it requires judicial approval right now. presumably, if it were a case constituting statutory rape, the marriage wouldn't be signed off.

this isn't about 9 year olds getting married to 30 year olds.

Statutory rape in California is sexual intercourse with anyone under 18. It’s a misdemeanor if the age difference is less than 3 years, but a felony if the adult is 21. So yes, a lot of these marriages would, in fact, constitute statutory rape.

That being said, the law makes an exception for married couples.

>That being said, the law makes an exception for married couples.

okay, so we're back to marriage != rape.

I was mostly addressing the “if it wasn’t statutory rape before marriage” claim. The fact is it usually would be.

No age limits in Guam and Saipan. Age limit of 15 in ¿Kansas? according to a page someone linked to somewhere else in the thread. Also that site claims the youngest marriage in the US since 2000 was a ten year old.

In the majority of US states the age of consent is 16 but the general marriage age is 18 so there quite a few states where you can have a child marriage without it being statutory rape.

If anyone is curious, the age of consent in the US is 18 in 11 states: Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

It is 17 in 6: Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New York, and Texas.

In the other 33, and also DC, it is 16.

It's interesting to compare to Europe. There it is:

  18 in 3 (Vatican City, Turkey, Malta)
  17 in 2 (Cypress, Ireland)
  16 in 20
  15 in 12
  14 in 14

Like the US the general marriage age is 18 in most of Europe, but several countries allow exceptions for 16-17 with parental or judicial consent.

wikipedia lists 18 european countries where the minimum age is 18 without exception. some of which changed that only recently.

from what I gather from lurking reddit out of morbid curiosity, it's currently en vogue to brand age gaps as grooming, even when the younger party is in their mid-20's.

meanwhile in the real world, 60% of men under 30 are single vs 30% of women, because women overwhelmingly prefer older men and men overwhelmingly prefer younger women.

Calling two midteens having sex "rape" or even worse "pedophilia" is plain abusive.

I'm not talking about older men here.

I'm saying that we need to be careful to avoid creating harm where there was none.

Pictures of yourself constituting child porn, making you a felon, is likewise abusive.

I've seen a pattern of judgemental women and men saying they are thinking of the children, while not understanding or not giving a shit, just how much hurt they cause those same children.

Our "justice" and "health" systems in New Zealand can cause lifelong harm to kids by black-and-white following the rules (at best, because wisdom is difficult or caring is risky).

Huh? Dude. The article is about a teenager marrying a 50 year old. I'm not talking about 2 16 year olds getting married.

You are just repeating the framing of the article. Next you'll mention a citation from a biased source.

Tht article doesn't mention the majority of those marriages between 17 year old female "children" marrying male "adults" (that are 18, 19 or 20 years old).

Children versus adults is a common framing, that is repeated by even the less biased sources such as the BBC or PBS: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interactive/child-marriag...

Crossing a legal line from a "child" of 17 to an "adult" of 18 doesn't have the implications about real world differences in wisdom we might hope for.

At least in California the statutory rape law exempted married couples.

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