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Comment by itslennysfault | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

In practice though, did any children (by OPs definition) actually get married, or were they all pubescent minors?

You could say the same thing, "California bans babies from marriage" technically true but wrong in context.

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