Sex is okay, just not with your spouse

I meant to say something about this after the story broke back in July about a 22-year-old Nebraska man who had married a 13-year-old and then been prosecuted for consummating the marrriage. (To be fair, there had been a certain amount of pre-consummation, as the girl was pregnant.) Now comes another such story, this time from Georgia, where a 37-year-old, equally knocked-up, married a 15-year-old boy and is now in jail.

Now, I have no problem with jailing adults who molest children, whatever the sex of the perp. And having teenagers of my own, I find both cases really creepy. What I have a problem with (and this is going to be unpopular, I know) is that the law presumes to prohibit sex between married people. In both cases, the marriage was legal, and the elder spouse fell afoul of laws intended to regulate extramarital sex. They married under duly enacted laws, and they performed acts that are not only permissible within a marriage, but more or less mandatory. And those acts were what they are now prosecuted for. There is a glaring hypocrisy in allowing a marriage to be performed and then prohibiting the natural exercise of that marriage.

I don't care what else is involved; if marriage is to be sacred, it must be sacred. Period. If we want to make the sanctity of marriage a part of our societal and legal foundation, we can't pick and choose which marriages we support.

Don't mistake what I'm saying. I'm not suggesting that this applies to homosexual partnership. By definition, such a union can't be a marriage. But in the case of two people of opposite sexes, there is no natural barrier to their creating a marriage bond. They are both physiological adults (as evidenced by the wives' condition), and the marriages are legal according to the laws of the states in which they married. If you want to prevent these marriages (and I'd love to), then change the laws as to who may marry whom. But once a marriage is made, it must – I repeat, must – be left alone. Otherwise, we cede precisely the same power over the definition of marriage that those who would redefine marriage to include homosexuality would claim. What God – or an otherwise recognized authority like a judge – hath joined, let no prosecutor put asunder.