Married at Fifteen?

I was taken by the headline elsewhere on this page, datelined Denver: "A 15-year-old girl can enter into a common-law marriage in Colorado, and younger girls and boys possibly can, too, a state appeals court ruled Thursday."

At first I was horrified. What could that judge have been thinking? "If you're old enough to put on a trench coat and shoot kids in your high school cafeteria, then damn it, you're old enough to make a lifetime commitment to someone special."

Seeking a more personal point of reference I went looking thru some of my old diaries to hear what I sounded like at fifteen. Here is an exerpt:

"Everybody hates me. So what I will do is work harder at being popular. And then some day if I am a neater type of person, then other neat people will not be so pissed off at me and will like me more sometimes."

So there you have it: Proof positive of the way that the razor sharp fifteen year old mind is able to focus like a laser on those big important life issues and dissect them with the kind of clarity and precision needed to form a mature conclusion. Oh sure; it may be true that many decades later I have only just begun to make any kind of a dent on that whole neat and popular thing. And even now the dent isn't very big. But you have to be impressed at the uncanny way I was able to see it all so clearly at fifteen.

And If that isn't example enough of the ability of the fifteen year old mind to make an intelligent choice in a marital partner, consider the specifics of the relationship upon which this judge in Colorado was ruling. The fifteen year old girl in question was being prevented from marrying a guy named Willis Rouse, 38, "who is serving time for escape and a parole violation." Obviously no one in their right mind would want to stand in the way of a fifteen year old hurling herself in to a blessed union like that one, (especially after learning that the bride's friends all thought he was incredibly cute.)

So summing up, now that the Judicial system of Denver Colorado has taken this first important step, perhaps we can all look foreward to the next logical thing, which would be for them to lower the voting age to fifteen. Maybe then the people of Colorado will finally elect a cuter neater set of appelate court judges and sanity will be restored.