I'd actually agree. If you had in Spain, in the 16th C. sex with an unmarried girl of 14, it was a crime. It was also one you could give amends for by marrying her.
The jurisdictions that put the age of consent above 14, which they shouldn't, typically also make it banned marrying girls that age, so they make marriage illegal at that age.
When you are not married, you should not have sex.
I have defended a couple where the local Imam braved the Swedish law, marrying a man of 24 to a girl of 14. Neither of them was as far as I know baptised, so the Muslim marriage was a naturally valid marriage. When she gave birth after 15, but well before 15 and 9 months, Swedish medical bureaucracy figured out she had been made pregnant at 14, contacted law enforcement, he was sent to gaol for two years or so, she was kept in a kind of orphanage (barn- och ungdomshem) or borstal, until she was 18. After that, they both went to Morocco and continued married life. I did defend them, not because I'm a Muslim, but because I think the law is bad.
Some think "that's a great law" ... unfortunately, that law became such in many if not all states in the early 1900's along with some other evil legislation, like eugenics, which was fortunately taken away in the 1970's. This kind of law, unfortunately, was not. Yes, it's bad on its own too. While it is a minority of abortions that are due to the mother being young, that minority is symbolically important.
Just as, overall, abortion and sodomy are a minority of the acts by which people having sex or having had sex avoid becoming parents, but their acceptance is symbolically important. So also, abortions of minors are symbolically important within abortions. We should not justify them. We should not justify a woman suffering from tokophobia having an abortion, and we should also not justify parents having vicarious tokophobia on behalf of a 14 year old or even younger daughter to push her to abortion.
In Italy, at any rate under Mussolini, 14 was the limit of age of consent. This did not just go for sex, but for abortion too. A woman above 14 aborting on her own got 1 to 4 years, or with medical help, she and the medical personnel both got between 2 and 5 years. However, if she was under 14, whoever pushed her to have an abortion (which she could not legally consent to) would incur 6 to 12 years. SO, the first principle here is, abortion is an evil act, and teen pregnancies are not a valid reason for abortion. Teen pregnancies are a valid reason to get married, and so also teens should be able to marry and have children insofar as their circumstances allow. And I mean both between them and with people above 18. Above the age of normal legal marriage, no age disparity is banned in the Christian jurisdictions I'm aware of. Only when it comes to sex in premarital age of one participant, there are in some "Romeo and Juliet clauses" very ill named. Not only was Juliet 14, but Romeo was fullgrown enough to kill a man in a duel, which a 14 or even 16 year old boy wouldn't have been. Duelling was illegal, by the way, but it was done anyway.
That Romeo would seem to have been 10 years older didn't seem to bother the Franciscan friar who (prior to the Council of Trent) married them in secret, without public bans. The council banned marriages contracted in secret from validity. This involves both marriages with only the contrahents, and marriages with a priest but no witnesses, as was the case with that conducted by Friar Laurence.
So, I would agree that a man having sex with a 14 year old girl would be committing a crime. I would not agree he would be committing a heinous crime or a perverted act (unless he used condoms, which is a perverted act, but that has nothing to do with age or age disparity). 2 years ago, I commented on a video, where a pastor was saying about a person who was married to a girl he had had sex with when she was 14 that he needed to be watched, because he had committed an act which the pastor considered extremely predatory.
So, I took offense at this pastor's advice, and two of my comments are simply under the video:
12:14 If the man's daughter is baptised, if the son in law is baptised, you are counselling that man to under certain circumstances destroy a Christian marriage.
13:19 I'm very glad the daughter didn't get into a relation with the brother of her husband ...
12:14 and 13:19 are timesstamps where I stopped to comment. Another comment of mine came under this comment, by a man:
As a Christian man I 100% believe in 2nd chances and forgiveness in saying that child molesters are a special kind of people you just can't trust at all around children ever.
I observed that at 14 she was legally a minor in her jurisdiction, but not a child. Not physically, obviously, but also not mentally, unless she had Down's syndrome, which the context showed she hadn't. There is a certain brain maturity that sets in around 25 years old, and it's obviously not that maturity which is required to consent to marriage, or, very imprudently, to sex before marriage.
I'm still getting replies. The latest is from today:
@hglundahl you’re scaring the rest of us by not knowing that a 14 year old is a child and being with someone that age is a sexual crime.
It is from a woman. Most of the comments I got that adverse were from women. I observed, as per above, I know that at 14 one is not a child, that it is probably a sexual crime in her jurisdiction, but all jurisdictions don't agree. And I felt sorry she was so easily scared. And overestimating the unity of all of mankind with her and against me.
I do not recommend to have sex before marriage, so I'm not pushing for just accepting people who did and that with 14 year old girls, but I do push for being more forgiving if they actually show an inclination to marry who they were doing something with. If they are faithful ... or in the case of the person discussed in the video, if their fidelity is deliberately being made more painful than marital fidelity should be.
Now, I don't think all of my readers through the States are this kind of easily shocked women, at least I hope not, but I think it is very probable that those who interfere in France about my situation are, and in Hong Kong and UK, the percentage would be higher:
| 19:32, 17.XII.2025, last 24 hours. | ||
| United States
250 + 2 + 2 + 5 + 253 + 1 + 74 + 367 + 13 + 888 + 2 + 2 + 4 + 14 + 10 + 13 + 12 + 41 + 235 + 8 + 6 + 60 + 205 + 3 + 21 + 75 + 23 + 9 + 3 + 226 + 289 + 7 + 358 + 62 + 27 + 7 = 3577 = 3,58 k 3,58 k + 1,02 k + 3,54 k + 1,05 k + 1,65 k + 1,13 k = 11,97 k | Hong Kong
13 + 4 + 25 + 22 + 10 + 7 + 1 + 35 + 24 + 2 + 10 + 1 + 1 + 158 + 19 + 42 = 374 = 0,37 k 0,37 k + 4,15 k + 1,1 k = 5,62 k | |
| Royaume-Uni
62 + 36 + 16 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 130 + 1 + 31 + 2 + 1 = 285 | France
5 + 12 + 5 + 6 + 9 = 37 | |
Ironic the number for France is so reduced, given I'm actually in France. But, if this is the kind of US reader who would contact France, the kind of person who is "scared" and believes every sane person is scared of me, who cannot hold a reasoned exchange on the topic and will not look at other topics, except as how they could relate to this one, or if they consider some other equally "unacceptable" ... perhaps there is an explanation for this ironic state of things. Or the 77 visitors I had from the Netherlands, a country with liberal abortion laws and liberal laws for any acts with previous consent if the persons are above 18 (including 50 Shades of Gray) but a very rigoristic view of any sex involving persons under 18. Rowling made an oblique reference to an English law making sex under 13 illegal as to consent, in the 19th C. Perhaps the long delay before you can no longer kill an unborn baby in the Netherlands has to do with pushing any girl who had sex under 18 and got pregnant to have an abortion, or every second girl ... in Italy, her parents would have got 6 to 12 years in prison for that. So would the parents, perhaps boyfriend and teachers of a 13 year old girl who was trying hard for five weeks to defend the life of her child, and was finally pushed to "consent" to the crime. It was in the papers between 2000 and 2003 or very early 2004, in Sweden. Including a paper that's offered for free, which I picked up.
There are obviously Swedes who want my skin because I defended the Moroccan couple and condemned the pressure on a 13 year old to abort. Even if that's before 2004, even if it involved no criminal condemnation against me, nor charge, nor even suspicion. Just as there are Americans who resent a comment I made two years ago, pretend I'm a scary sicko, imagine they are calling me to repent from something as grave as or graver than sodomy, because, there is a certain glorification of psychiatry. Normal criminal justice is content when someone has done the time. Perhaps for some time also being on a register. Whether it's forever or for some time. Always supposing there was an actual crime. But the kind of people who run psychiatry want to pursue and pursue and pursue, regardless of how long afterwards and even if there was no actual crime. And yes, to some of them, only a very perverted pedophile could consider a person of age 14 as being able to validly consent to sex. So, my value proves, to them, their suspicion about me. It doesn't occur to them that in strict medical definitions pedophilia means an exclusive attraction to persons below the age of puberty.
Here are limits in Catholic canon law, 1917:
LIBER SECUNDUS. DE PERSONIS.
...
Can. 88. par. 1. Persona quae vicesimum primum aetatis annum explevit, maior est; infra hanc aetatem, minor.
par. 2. Minor, si masculus, censetur pubes* a decimoquarto**, si femina, a duodecimo anno completo.***
par. 3. Impubes, ante plenum septennium, dicitur infans seu puer vel parvulus et censetur non sui compos; expleto autem septennio, usum rationis habere praesumitur. Infanti assimilantur quotquot usu rationis sunt habitu destituti.
Why exactly? In fact, this law put marital age two years above puberty ... well, look at
LIBER QUARTUS, PARS TERTIA DE SINGULIS DELICTIS EORUMQUE POENIS
Can. 160.
§ 2. Legitime damnati° de delictis cum impuberibus°° commissis, stupro violento, sodomia, incestu, lenocinio, ipso facto infames sunt infamia iuris, praeter alias poenas quas Ordinarius infligendas indicaverit.
So, the Catholic assessment is, you are a lifelong official lowlife (only the Pope can absolve you) if you have committed a crime with a boy under 14 or a girl under 12 and have been legitimately condemned for that. I think that kind of lowlife is what is usually referred to as pedophile or more precisely pedo-criminal.
Obviously the infamy does not follow if there is just a shrink making an assessment of your inclination, or a hysteric and non-Catholic US American doing so, or even less from actually defending the position of the Catholic Church over the ages.
Return to Friar Laurence. Encyclopedia Britannica reads, in the part available as preview:
Friar Laurence
Friar Laurence. Friar Laurence, a well-intentioned but foolish Franciscan priest in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. [31 juli 2025]
I think those people are very far out in calling Friar Laurence a fool. He was dissuading from suicide, alas in vain as it turned out. His plan to make them successfully escape may have had holes in it, but the actual idea of making an escape to marry (against the wishes of the parents) is also found in Place Royale, a comedy by Corneille. The nobler couple has the lover tell his beloved she should become a nun. The more down to earth escape, are married by a Jesuit priest and the parents accept that.
To get back to the topic of lying with someone you are not married to, if you refused to then marry the woman who had been a girl up to you, you could get executed. This is the plot of two plays based on a current event, and both are called The Mayor of Zalamea (I have a tendency, alas, to confuse them with Fuente Ovejuna ... also two plays, also by the same two playwrights). We don't know whether it's Zalamea de la Serena in Extremadura or Zalamea la Real in Huelva. So, we cannot exactly pinpoint the current event (unlike with Fuente Ovejuna, which took place in a night in April of 1476 in a place now called Fuente Obejuna, in Córdoba). Again, the problem isn't the age of the mayor's daughter, she was "pubes", the problem was 1) getting to the act before the wedding, 2) doing it with a girl up to then a virgin, 3) refusing to marry the virgin you had deflourished.
Given that in for instance today's France, doing it with a 14 year old girl would automatically involve getting to the act before the wedding and automatically involve then not marrying her (because France wouldn't allow it), I can obviously not say it wouldn't be criminal. But it wouldn't be a crime with a prepuberty child, and the qualifier child doesn't apply to minors above puberty.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Ember Wednesday after Holy Cross
17.IX.2025
PS, for those who imagine I'm totally obsessed with this one question, for no reason except my persistently disagreeing with them, and who would argue something based on the supposed obsession, on this blog, the label de iuvenum matrimoniis has 71 posts and the label de psychiatrie malitia 141. This is on a blog with 4454 overall posts, and the label being in Latin is because it applies to posts both in English and in French./HGL
PPS, yes, "also make band marrying girls that age, so they make marriage illegal at that age" is a clunky sentence, but I woke up before 4 AM and it's 9:49 PM./HGL
* Pubes = having attained puberty. ** decimoquarto fourteenth [anno completo, see next] *** duodecimo anno completo = twelfth completed year ° legitimately condemed [for] °° having NOT attained puberty.
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