Thank you for your posts Slidin and Darkpillver.
When children cannot legally consent to sex, how can they consent to marriage? So by the same token, marriage to a child cannot be voluntary. Children have sexual feelings too and when children have sex with other children and there is a pregnancy, seems that parents can legally turn the event into a shotgun wedding. What is disturbing to most people though, is how can it ever be legal for an adult to marry or to have sex with a child, but that is the way the law is crafted. ( An 18 year old is too young to consume alcohol but old enough to be killed in a battlefield -go figure.) It is unthinkable to understand how the mind of some adult can even consider getting any sexual gratification from an infant child and such a person can't offer any acceptable defense to a horrified jury. But when the age of the child is such that the child can legally marry, an accused child molestor of a child of such age can point to the law showing that it is perfectly legal to have sex with children only not in his case for whatever legal reasons he is being brought up on charges for the act, and from a legal perspective, the defense can show that there is nothing to be horrified about having sex with children of the age that are having sex already, pointing to the law.
