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Wonkette: Republican congresscritter killed anti-child bride bill
From the Wonkette blog: Florida Congressthing Ileana Ros-Lehtinen Killed Anti-Child-Bride Bill, Because Abortion:
An eight-year-old Yemeni girl died of internal bleeding on her wedding night after marrying a man five times her age, a social activist and two local residents said, in a case that has caused an outcry in the media and revived debate about child brides.
There are about eighty gazillion things wrong with that sentence. And you wanna know an additional terrible part? There was a bill in Congress to help deal with this very issue… you’ll never guess which party killed it!! (Spoiler: It was Republicans.)
............//snip
A few years ago, some Legislative Badasses, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), were all like, child marriage is TEH WORST, and introduced a bill, the International Protecting Girls By Preventing Child Marriage Act. Long name, but it gets to the point eventually. And the Senate even passed it UNANIMOUSLY in 2010. What would this bill have done? Per Foreign Policy:
If passed, the bill would have authorized the president to provide assistance “to prevent the incidence of child marriage in developing countries through the promotion of educational, health, economic, social, and legal empowerment of girls and women.”
Yeah, that sounds about right. Sounds like something the American people can get behind. Maybe we disagree about some things, but for all that is good and just in the world, can’t we all agree that GODDAM EIGHT-YEAR-OLDS should not FUCKING MARRY FORTY-YEAR OLD MEN?!?! Apparently, we can’t all agree on that. No seriously, we can’t all agree on that, because as we said before, sometimes the world is a giant sack of suck, wrapped in awfulness, tied off with a bow of despair. One night in 2010:
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) defeated a bill Thursday evening that would have committed the United States to combating forced child marriages abroad, by invoking concerns about the legislation’s cost and that funds could be used to promote abortion.
Sen. Durbin did manage to slip some of the anti-child-bride language into the Violence Against Women Act passed in Jan 2013, over Republican opposition.
As I've said before: God! I love Wonkette!
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