Interesting Texas Marriage Statistics.

To bolster my claim that you can marry in Texas at young ages, I present the following, which you may check for YOURSELVES at the website Texas provides. Texas has not yet posted 2007 statistics, so I offer you the following.

Texas recorded two marriages in 2005 involving a 13 year old girl. One may have been the recording of an "informal" marriage as Texas statute calls it, that had been established years earlier, but one for certain in Starr county occurred for a girl at the age of 13, in 2005.

I haven't counted the total of 14 year old girls for that year, but using the same conservative methodology, Texas recorded five marriages of 14 year old girls in 2006, the year after (maybe) SB6 (2005) was passed. The effective dates on SB6 are murky. Those marriages occurred in Cameron, Gonzales, Lamar, El Paso and Angelina counties.

Without doing the manual counting required, I theorize that the age of 15 probably gets more hits, and 16 likewise. It is entirely legal to marry and thus entirely legal to have sex with someone when you are 13 or 14 or 15. After 16 there seems to be increasingly less clamor regarding youth and creepiness. By the time someone gets to 18 the age difference involved in some marriages merely draws sustained clucking and criticism. More →

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