Says who?I would not have marriage controlled by the government at all. That is for the Church and individual adults. As for crimes against children, **children cannot give consent **and sexual contact with them should always be punished as crimes.
That message sounds like someone who is trying to salvage a bad situation. That’s what will always happen when you look to the government to protect your institutions.I agree with you, but the problem is that this is not the message coming from the Church. The message coming from them is " if you don’t agree with us that the government should be in charge of protecting marriage, you aren’t in full communion with the church.
I suspect you and I have not had any discussions before. Otherwise, you would not be accusing me of having a slavish respect for governmental decree.Says who?
The age of consent in the Church is 12.
What you cite is an arbitrary law that varies region to region, used to justify an arbitrary belief.
Why would you punish sexual contact or marriage with a 13 year old? Because the law says so? That means if the law were to change tomorrow to age 10, you’d support it?
I agree with you. However, in the defense of homosexual unions, we often see the argument against the same logic being applied to children under 18 marrying, because they cannot give their consent, but that very notion is flawed because the age of consent legally can be changed and isn’t set in stone, and in fact, the Church has a much different view.I suspect you and I have not had any discussions before. Otherwise, you would not be accusing me of having a slavish respect for governmental decree.
All I said was that children are too young to give meaningful consent. I have no problem with the idea that the marriageable age would vary by the culture and the individual.