Marriage Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Marital Exemption For Sexual Abuse Could Be Removed From State Code

Currently there is a exemption for sexual abuse in marriage. Monday the Senate passed a bill that would change that.

The bill requires that there was physical force that overcame earnest resistance.

Lead sponsor of the bill, Sen. Ryan Weld, R-Brooke, said he is following in the steps of his predecessor, the late Sen. Judith Herndon who removed the marital exception from the state’s sexual assault code. She was the only woman in the Senate at the time.

In West Virginia sexual assault is in most cases considered rape. Sexual abuse is unwanted groping or otherwise unwanted touching inappropriately.

“So this is carrying on what I believe to be an unfinished job that she wasn’t able to get done for she unfortunately passed away in 1980,” Weld said. “Sexual abuse currently in code has an exception, what is known as the marital exception. And so that if you are married to somebody, and you touch them in a private area as the result of forcible compulsion, you cannot be convicted of a crime.”

Sen. Michael Azinger, R-Wood, was one of nine no votes. He said he doesn’t have a problem with the entire bill, just parts of it.

“If you have just your general play between husband and wife,” Azinger said. “That goes on in every marriage in every house and something goes bad, then a divorce comes along with something like that. That could be used potentially against the husband in later times.”

Update: Minimum Marriage Age Becomes Law

As it was originally passed in the House of Delegates, House Bill 3018 establishes 18 as the age of consent for marriage and removes the ability of an underaged person to obtain consent to marry through a guardian or courts.

Friday night, the Senate took up the bill and changed the minimum age to 16 but also added that there could not be more than 4 years age difference between the two people.

Updated on Saturday, March. 11, 2023 at 6:40 p.m.

After being revived in the final hours of the 2023 Legislative session, House Bill 3018 was amended by the Senate Friday night to allow those 16 years and older to be married, with limitations.

Saturday evening the House of Delegates accepted those amendments without debate and passed the bill with a vote of 83 yeas, 9 nays and 8 absent or not voting.

Original Post:

Under current law, 16 and 17-year-olds can marry with parental consent and anyone under the age of 16 can be married in West Virginia with a certificate from a judge.

Friday night, the Senate took up the bill and changed the minimum age to 16 but also added that there could not be more than 4 years age difference between the two people. This change was specifically to stop older men from grooming teenage girls for marriage.

During discussion of the bill Thursday night, Sen. Mike Woelfel, D-Cabell, shared his own experience of helping a woman who had been married in 8th grade get a divorce. On Friday, he discussed the financial pressures young couples can face, and countered personal stories shared by other Senators of happy endings for young marriages.

“Yes, many years ago – 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, things were a bit different,” Woelfel said. “There are family pressures, there are financial pressures, but not all stories end that way. I recall reading about a very young couple that got married. The pressure of their situation was so intense, he committed suicide and she stabbed herself with his dagger. This is not a new problem.”

West Virginia has the highest rate of child marriages in the country, and Woelfel said that with most of those marriages happening with 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds, the amendment would not significantly address the issue.

Woelfel was ultimately the only no vote on the bill as it passed the Senate because he wanted to keep to the House’s original age of 18.

Sen. Mike Stuart, R-Kanawha, also stood in support of the bill, but said the issue had been blown out of proportion by the national media.

“I said my goodness, if West Virginia is so far outside the norm, if those folks are playing politics with this issue, I said I better take a look at what the rest of the country does on this subject,” Stuart said. “In the U.S. an individual can marry without parental consent at the age of 18 in all states except Nebraska, where the age of consent is 19. Most states have a minimum marriage age for minors with parental consent ranging from 12 to 17 years old, California, Mississippi don’t have minimum ages.”

He also cited statistics from the Director of Vital Statistics that showed there were only six marriages of 14-year-olds and 15-year-olds in West Virginia between 2012 and 2021, all to people aged 21 or younger.

Sen. Charles Trump, R- Morgan, gave several examples of concerning age disparities in marriages in West Virginia.

“On the far right side of the chart, there was one 16 year old girl who married a 40 year old male and one who married a 49 year old male. A 16 year old girl marrying a 49 year old male in West Virginia,” he said. “This amendment, if it becomes law, will prevent that. The amendment says you can’t marry anybody who’s more than four years older than you are.”

The amendment passed on a voice vote.

The bill had a contentious route to pass, and was considered dead in the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday, before being revived and returned to the Senate floor by a procedural motion Thursday night.

House Bill 3018 now returns to the House of Delegates for its consideration of the Senate’s amendment.

Child Marriage Bill Returns; Up For Senate Vote

Less than 24 hours after the Senate Judiciary Committee voted down a bill to provide a minimum age for marriage in West Virginia, it was revived.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Sen. Charles Trump, R-Morgan, moved House Bill 3018 out of committee and put it back in front of the full Senate using a procedural vote. This bill makes the minimum age 18 to get married.

The Senate voted on it a second time and moved it to third reading on Friday with the right to amend.

In Senate remarks, Sen. Mike Woelfel, D-Cabell, said he supported the bill.

“What we have in this day, frequently, is called grooming,” he said. “You have men in their thirties or older who groom young girls, and the next thing you know some young girl has convinced her parents to let her get married. And it’s really close to duress. It’s an undue influence. Undue influence can set aside another contract, and it is actually grounds to set aside divorce, that may be grounds for annulment.”

As West Virginia law stands, there is no minimum age to marry. Children can marry as young as 16 in West Virginia, with parental consent. Anyone younger than that must get a judge’s waiver.

Sen. Mike Stuart, R-Kanawha, offered an alternative to 18 for discussion Friday.

“My parents married at 16,” he said. “They are disgustingly in love that they can’t keep their hands off each other. And so I would ask this body to consider a more reasonable figure of 16. I support that figure. I think our counterparts will agree to 16. I think this is about a floor as opposed to a finite number. And I just ask you to consider that over the next 24 hours.”

The bill was introduced in the House of Delegates by Del. Kayla Young, D-Kanawha. She told the committee Wednesday night that seven percent of marriages in the last decade included someone who was under 18. Young said more than 750 child marriages have been performed since 2000.

Bill To Ban Child Marriage Defeated In Senate Judiciary Committee

As West Virginia law stands, there is no minimum age to marry. Children can marry as young as 16 in West Virginia, with parental consent. Anyone younger than that must get a judge’s waiver.

A bill to keep minors from getting married in West Virginia was defeated Wednesday in a late-night Senate Judiciary Committee meeting.

The committee rejected a vote to report House Bill 3018 to the full Senate by a vote of nine to eight.

As West Virginia law stands, there is no minimum age to marry. Children can marry as young as 16 in West Virginia, with parental consent. Anyone younger than that must get a judge’s waiver.

This legislation would have removed these exceptions and made the age of consent for marriage 18 years old.

Del. Kayla Young, D-Kanawha, was the lead sponsor of the bill. Before the vote, she spoke to the committee, citing statistics from the Pew Research Center showing that West Virginia has the highest rate of child marriage in the country.

Young said, since 2012, seven marriages out of 100 performed in West Virginia involved someone under the age of 18. She also told the committee that 753 marriages involving children have been performed since 2000.

“I know that there are a lot of people who maybe their parents were married as a child or they had a baby when they were under 18,” Young said. “But what this bill sets out to do is to set the legal age of marriage at 18. There are a few reasons for that. The biggest reason is children don’t have the same legal rights as adults do, they can’t sign a contract, they can’t get a lease, they can’t open a bank account, they can’t get a protective order, they can’t file for divorce, because they’re under 18 years old.”

Young also spoke about the negative outcomes of marriage under 18, stating the divorce rate for people under 18 is 80 percent, which is 30 percent higher than the national average for adults.

“The last big problem is that this really undermines our statutory rape laws because right now, the age of consent for sex is 16, the age of marriage is zero. There’s no floor. All the states around us at least have a floor, we don’t have anything,” Young said. “So this would set it at 18. And the data that we’ve seen shows that there have been 41 cases that would have violated our rape laws because one of the children was under the age of 16.”

The committee had no questions for Young. However, before they could move to report the bill to the full Senate floor, Sen. Patricia Rucker, R-Jefferson, made a motion to table the bill.

That motion failed by a narrow vote of 8 in favor and 9 opposed.

The committee then returned to their pending question, of whether to report the bill to the full Senate.

The motion to report House Bill 3018 to the Senate floor failed with Sens. Mike Azinger, Laura Chapman, Mark Hunt, Patrick Martin, Mark Maynard, Patricia Rucker, David Stover, Mike Stuart and Jay Taylor voting against it.

After the bill was rejected, Sen. Mike Woefel, D-Cabell, asked to speak to the committee.

“I just wanted to remind everyone in the room that this is National Women’s Day,” he said.

Young tweeted the following statement after the vote.

“Senate Judiciary voted down HB3018, the bill to end Child Marriage in WV,” she wrote. “They first moved to table the bill without discussion, which failed, so they killed the bill instead. For now, there will be no floor for the age of marriage in WV, endangering our kids.”

West Virginia House: Clergy Can Refuse Marriages

West Virginia’s House has passed a bill that says clergy in the state don’t have to perform marriages that don’t conform to their “sincerely held religious beliefs” and cannot be sued for refusing.

Judiciary Committee Chairman John Shott, a Bluefield Republican, says it clarifies the law though he was aware of no such lawsuits in the state.

Delegate Mike Pushkin, a Charleston Democrat, says the First Amendment already protects clergy against such infringement on beliefs, and the bill is an attempt to “pander” to what some lawmakers see as “an intolerant element in their own base.”

Delegate S. Marshall Wilson, a Gerrardstown Republican, says a quick Google search produced an article about an Idaho city ordinance telling pastors to perform gay marriages or go to jail.

The bill passed 90-5. Read the bill here.