Benjamin McGuire

No, you didn't appeal to a broad range of cultural facts. Cultural facts are not created by state law. Cultural facts are created by reality. For example, regardless of what the state law says, the average age of first marriage for a woman in 1840 would have been somewhere between 20 and 21. Marriage of 14 year olds was not at all common in that time period. I think that you are fabricating societal norms. Romeo and Juliette? We do have Romeo and Juliette laws which generally prevent prosecution when children who are similar in age engage in consensual intimacy. But that's a different issue. I will spell out the problem I have with you specifically though (well the narrow one involved in this discussion). Your argument is that we are "infantilizing" young people - giving them an unnecessary adolescence. You are arguing that if it wasn't for our modernist preference for delaying marriage, that we would (and perhaps should) still be marrying off children to older men. These views are wrong. The evidence for the value of adolescence isn't simply anecdotal. It isn't based on modernist trends. It is based on our growing understanding of human development (both biological and neurological). Our societal desire to restrict the age of marriage is coupled with a recognition that we need to protect children's autonomy, and that we need to limit child abuse, and that we need to have some protections for their health. These are not factors that have somehow mysteriously changed over time. Individuals do not finish their neurological or biological development any faster in the past than they do in the present. You want to ignore all of this. You are ignoring everything I am saying aren't you. Probably because it doesn't really fit with what you are saying. I am not passing judgment on anyone. I am passing judgment on practices. It is immoral to have 14 year old girls get married. It doesn't matter what the context is. I can say this because I believe in the notion of human rights - that there are things which people morally should have - regardless of the context. This is different from saying that those in the past were immoral for violating human rights. You may not be able to recognize the distinction, but it is there. If you cannot recognize the distinction, then, as I suggested above, you are entirely in a world of moral relativism - where moralism is based on the whims of society and there is no underlying moral framework to start from. I don't think that there is anyone here who would ever believe that I am a fundamentalist. Do you think that it is moral for children to be place into arranged marriages with old men? That is a question that I would like you to answer. It doesn't have to be a historically consistent answer. You might think that it is immoral now, and not immoral in the past. How your belief is parsed isn't so important as to have you produce it. See, this is simply wrong. We aren't treating teens as babies. We don't make them wear diapers. We don't feed them in high chairs (because they can't do it themselves). Your hyperbole is part of the problem here. I am not misunderstanding the concept. I am disagreeing with it (as do most people and professionals today). The idea that we are infantilizing children by giving them an adolescence is a fringe belief - not a normative belief. And the reality is that most children I am aware of have real chores to do - most get jobs. The thing is, though, we tend to put limits on the types of chores (and jobs) that adolescents are allowed to have. One of the things that we do not believe that young teenagers are ready to do is to be married and raising children. There is a certain sense of irony in your comments when you talk about the idea of it being sexual - and then use as examples Romeo and Juliette, or King Josiah (who had a child at the age of 13). This is the idea that sex is included here. And you are the one bringing it in to the picture. Sex isn't abhorrent. But coerced sex between a 14 year old girl getting married to a much older man through a marriage arranged by her parents - that is abhorrent. And part of our abhorrence is the violation of the human rights that most of us accept. Perhaps you don't value those human rights. Perhaps in your perspective, this is all about modernism (and post-modernism) corrupting those pre-modern values that we should return to. I am not interested in going there. And yet you are failing to respond to the issues. Let's keep at it. I asked a specific question, perhaps you would be kind enough to answer it.

And now we get a claim of cognitive dissonance from someone who has no idea what the term means.

This is why presentism is a challenge. In fact, to avoid presentism you avoid discussing both what is "bad" and what is "good" in the other context. An anthropologist avoids making all judgments of this sort in their work. Robert F. Smith, as I recall (and perhaps incorrectly) is himself opposed to the idea that the study of religions needs to be done outside of a position of belief. The academy often implicitly believes that a religious believer cannot avoid a presentist perspective in their approach to the study of belief. This split on the idea is the reason why, when someone raises the specter of presentism in a discussion, they are almost always engaging in it themselves. Why? Because they are trying to pass judgment in one way or another. Most discussions don't occur within that anthropological framework, disinterested in truth or morality. And the reason why this is important is that we are generally going to be discussing the past (or discussing other cultures) in a context that doesn't require this sort of strict neutralism. This is especially true in a religious context. We aren't having a history of religions discussion about Mormonism here. We aren't engaging in an anthropological approach to religion. So there isn't this need for some sort of strict presentism. And this is why I was pointing out that in the context of a discussion like this, the only real effect of arguing that your opponent is engaging in presentism is in fact to make an argument for a moral relativism. And while there are and can be a range of views on the place and importance of moral relativism, most of the time, my experience has been that those who are arguing that presentism is going on are in fact at least moderately opposed to the idea of moral relativism. The claim of presentism is a way to try and shut down the argument rather than a way of furthering the discussion.

I won't disagree with you about some of what you say here. The notion that adolescence as an extension of childhood is infantilizing comes out of the work of Robert Epstein - who believed that for many if not most of our children, adolescence is a completely useless period, constructed by psychologists. However ... I think that Robert wouldn't be particularly in favor of Epstein's solution - the creation of a competency test designed to determine when someone is ready for adulthood (ready to get married, etc). And hey, while we are at it, let's open up alcohol to adolescents, let's get them voting, driving cars, working overtime jobs, and so on. For the record, of course, in Epstein's view, parental permission should not be a part of adolescent marriage - after all, it should be their decision, and a recognition of their adulthood. I don't really have an issue with Robert bringing this up - and Epstein isn't what we would consider mainstream by any stretch of the imagination. The problem is the language in this specific situation. When we are talking about preventing people from getting married at 14 years old as infantilizing them - there's a line that exists there that is being crossed through language - intending to create an emotional response. And if Robert isn't going to explain what he means by using that term, it becomes a problem. I think that most of us would all agree that much like the choice of drinking alcohol, the choice of getting married is not appropriate for 14 year olds - and our decisions not to let children drink should not be considered "infantilization" any more than not letting them decide to get married.

Nonsense Robert. I think you are misunderstanding the notion of presentism. When you measure Joseph Smith's behavior by appealing to Old Testament contexts - when you appeal to Shakespeare, when you engage with other cultures at other times - this is also presentism. There is a huge gulf between what you are doing and what an anthropologist does. Your apologetics is in fact deeply interested in passing judgement. You do not have some sort of intellectual disinterest in the subject. And I can see this all over everything you write in this thread. On the other side of the coin, I am not being presentist because I am focusing on the practice and not the culture. Consider that we believe in a notion of "human rights" (granted you might not, but most of us do). When we have a human right, then that is a right that exists and defines moral principles that exist outside of a cultural setting. To go back to your comments - you use the term "infantilizing" because it invokes the idea of relationships between adults and infants. This is something that we believe is abhorrent regardless of the cultural context. We don't believe that you could produce even an imaginary context in which such a thing would be considered acceptable or even moral. We have the same beliefs about slavery today, and murder, and so on. This means that we believe that slavery is wrong in every context. This isn't passing judgement on those cultures that have engaged in slavery. This is passing judgment on the idea of slavery itself. An anthropologist has little concern with this issue - because his job isn't about discussing the morality of slavery in a particular context, but of the role that slavery played in that society and the causes and outcomes of that slavery. But your interest isn't this sort of disinterested anthropological point of view. So your suggestion of presentism is at best the pot calling the kettle black, and at worst nothing more than hypocrisy. The number one factor for delaying marriage in the US is economic instability. It isn't simply a "modern, enlightened POV". I would go so far as to suggest that it is this sort of attitude that makes it difficult for politicians to have an interest in trying to address the root causes of low marriage and fertility rates. There is a reason why, in other countries who face this problem, that there is a such a different set of approaches. More free child care. More free education. Japan offers monthly cash allowances for children of the middle class and below. We get mandatory parental leave. Limits on overtime, and 4 day work-weeks. Anyway, it's a long list. Instead, we have a system that penalizes marriage for most people (especially those with children). And if you don't have a religious system that places significant value on marriage, you don't really get a lot of incentives to get married - and you have a lot of uncertainty when having children. On top of that, much of the US has housing problems, where the cost of housing has outpaced inflation even more than, say, the cost of a college education. To provide some context, if housing costs had simply kept pace with inflation since 1963, the average home today would cost only 178K, instead of the real average cost of 431K. The state of our society and its commitment to families is far different today than it was for you and I when we were young and starting our families. So anyone who simply claims that the state of marriage in our society is caused because a "modern, enlightened POV" is spewing nonsense - albeit these are the talking points of those who favor continuing to erode our social safety nets.

I wanted to clarify my position. Presentism is the idea of judging the past by modern day norms and expectations. There isn't a lot of value in that. However, it isn't presentism to judge the practice itself - outside of that historical context. What I mean by that is that I think that there is a completely moral argument in the idea that it is wrong for parents to arrange marriages for children. Unless, or course, you want to engage the position of moral relativism - to suggest that just because we have high schools, that it is morally wrong now, and because they didn't, it was not morally wrong then. And I suppose you could take that position. But the reality is that human neurological development hasn't really changed in the last 2,000 years (let alone the last 200). Children did not become mature adults as teenagers 2,000 years ago any more than they do today. And this is on top of the rather offensive suggestion that you make here in your comparing concerns with 14 year old children getting married to the idea of infants getting married (that is such a gross and offensive comparison Robert). Having said that, I wanted to point out a couple of other things - Let's start with Romeo and Juliette. They never got married. Why? Because when Juliette fakes her own death to avoid a forced marriage to an older man, Romeo commits suicide. And shortly afterward, Juliette commits suicide. If anything, there is a moral lesson here being shared by Shakespeare over the issue of teenagers being forced into arranged marriages. And it isn't the lesson you are offering us. Even today, with our modern medical technology, 14 year old girls giving birth are five times more likely to die in childbirth than are women who do the same in their 20s. They aren't really built for it. It isn't normal or healthy or good - especially in aggregate. Instead of using the examples that may have worked from the past - which aren't necessarily mainstream - let's discuss all of the problem cases that have come with underage forced marriages and address those alongside your examples. Then we would have a real picture of what is going on instead of this fantasy world that you are living in.

Suggesting that on the basis of history that marrying 14 years olds is appropriate is itself morally abominable.