TOM: Selling the bride
We don’t sell the bride in America.
So the heinous character in California that expected his neighbor to cough up $16k, plus 100 cases of beer and gatorade and stuff, that is outrageous. Clearly criminal.
Apparently statutory rape – the dead-beat, 18 year old husband-that-was-to-have-been having sex with the 14 year old girl – is a *lesser* charge than trading her for beer?
“Martinez was charge with a far more serious crime..”
(Quote from a local TV station video covering the story. h/t The Other McCain.)
Frankly, I don’t see a crime on Daddy’s part. Bad social kharma for American tastes, but .. The only legal snag I see is permitting/encouraging/requiring his 14 year old daughter to cohabit before marriage.
Remember – marrying at 12-14 was the norm in the US colonies hundreds of years ago, that resulted in our modern world. And this is also common in the culture this father and daughter come from. The age 14 is an issue because Americans lately (historically speaking) made it one.
Forty (40) and fifty (50) years ago statutory rape was a big issue, sending many young (and not so young) men to juvenile detention or prison. Now we have celebrities under the age of consensual sex coming up pregnant – and no charges are filed. (Statutory rape, as I understand it, presumes that a person younger than the age of consent – set by the state – is too young to understand the consequences of agreeing to sex, so any sex is presumed to be predatory – a coerced sex act, or rape.)
Of course, adultery is against the law in most states, and I can’t remember the last time I recall hearing of adultery – having sex with a married person not your spouse – being filed or prosecuted.
So, this 14 year old’s daddy arranges with the 18 year old guy living next door to agree to a marriage, for consideration. Nothing in the story suggests the bride was reluctant, was abused (other than that pesky statutory rape thing). The law got called in when Daddy didn’t get paid. Then things hit the Main Stream Media and all the outrage (“100 cases of Corona! That’s the cheap stuff!”) blew onto Daddy, too.
Now, in a traditional American wedding, the Father of the Bride is expected to fund the wedding. The groom’s family is expected to fund the reception. Let’s see, that wouldn’t come anywhere close to $16,000 and a hundred cases of beer..
Frankly, I think the girl is better off. If she was planning on Daddy doing up a wedding for her, and all he could find was deadbeat that wouldn’t pay up what he promised, she can surely at least find a guy that will keep his promised until the wedding!
I wonder if all the do-gooders arresting the men in this girl’s life have actually looked at what is happening to her, and considered where her interests lie? If she has been raised in a culture and belief that this is acceptable and expected – how will she cope with the destruction of her life plan, with arrest of her husband-to-be for being engaged, with arrest of her father for finding her the husband she wanted?
Granted, I could be coming at this all wrong. The girl in question could well have been misused. The 18 year old neighbor could be a predator. Dad could be pulling a perverted, heinous crime. But the only outrage among the neighbors, among the girl’s family, from school records (she moved, right?) and from the girl, seems to be – the neighbor didn’t pay what he promised.
We don’t go to Mexico and harass people that make these same arrangements as a matter of course. We don’t go to India and ban arranged marriages, or wax eloquent about how the Italians in Shakespeare’s time traded daughters to seal business arrangements, we don’t ponder the crowned heads of Europe that traded in daughters to seal political agreements, or hold *executing* inconvenient brides against the English rulers of old. We might hate the maiming of young women in Islamic “female circumcision” (remove the clitoris) yet we have not concerted national policy nor effective counter to the barbaric procedure. We know that many parts of the world require women to be clothed head to toe in non-descript garments, at risk of stoning, we know they are sold for wives at early ages, and we know that multiple wives are accepted in Muslim nations. Yet we hold this father as committing a crime worse that statutory rape.
I might prefer to see her make her own mistakes. I might prefer to see that she reaches an age of a bit more experience before making relationship, sex, and marriage decisions. But she isn’t my daughter, she wasn’t raised in my church or my community, and I haven’t seen or heard anything that might be taken for a bad situation or a request for help.
Frankly, I haven’t seen the crime, yet. My best wishes to the girl and her family.
If that way of thinking is how she has been raised…. I think she might need NML’s advice very much as she grows up…
Loving Annie’s last blog post..Wednesday Appreciation : The Letter "A"
Loving Annie, this really can be a difference in culture.
In 1985 I worked with a woman from India, developing software. When she left India with her husband, she had been a physician, but the US (California) didn’t recognize her medical background. So she was a software engineer.
Madhira told me she met her husband at the wedding ceremony. I don’t know how happy the couple was, but they were together some 12-15 years later. As I mentioned before, in 1970 Iowa State University in a class on marriage and marriages, put forth that arranged marriages were the most common, around the world.
The premise of the arranged marriage is that the parents, perhaps with the assistance of a community matchmaker (as in Disney’s Mulan, or in Fiddler on the Roof), choose the likely mate. Note the Bible makes no mention of affection between man and wife, only adherence to custom, law, and beliefs. We know that courtly love, what became ‘romance’ in today’s world, was invented during the Renaissance – almost yesterday, in the history of mating and relationships. In America, intimate relationships outside marriage have mostly come about since the rebellious 1960′s with free love, feminism, etc. At least, adultery and fornication (sex between unmarried persons) crimes have seldom been prosecuted since then.
It is plausible that her father picked a guy that would be a good mate to the girl – except he has this one niggling little character flaw – he didn’t fulfill his promises, nor marry the girl who was supposed to be his bride.
Just because the custom didn’t work for this girl is not sufficient reason to declare the practice abominable – look at how many people need the kind of help found at Baggage Reclaim and look a the number of failed marriages. When we look at how many students fail to complete high school, should we be claiming “High School is a failure! Shut it down! It is abominable!” No. We look at the people in each instance, we encourage the practices and people that seem to work out, we look for reasons that the problems affect the outcome, and we patch up what we can.
In this case, publicly point out to Daddy Garcia that he picked a real bozo for his daughter – one that won’t honor his word and his promises. And still I won’t be surprised to find that the cash and stuff was bribes to her Dad, from the guy she ran away from home to be with. The “marriage” thing might be a cover story for the family and neighbors. “Sneaking around” has been going on a *long* time. It could happen! lol!