Ouch! current homepage of cnn.com

[BarackTheVote]

48. Juliet was 13 and Romeo was probably between 16 and 18

So, yeah, "child marriage" has been around for a long time and the norm as we see it is a relatively new thing. That said, if I'm not mistaken, there was a lot more family involvement before recent times; individuals were less mobile and so tended to remain in family units where several generations would share a household (the average age thing is a canard--child death was extraordinarily high and wars made an impact on the 16-30-something range, but if you lives past childhood and avoided dying in a war, you were very likely to live into your 70s-80s).

The Western World has exaggerated the length of childhood, but a lot of that, I feel has to do with the fact that there's such a richness of freely-available knowledge that you simply need more time to become acclimated to the outside world, especially since part of the standard marriage thing in this day in age is that you move away from home into a household that is just you and your spouse and eventually your children. Age and phases of life are largely a sociological construct; as far as nature is concerned, we're mature when we become fertile. But in the modern world, as I said, you have to learn more to be a functioning part of society; people in the past simply had less to learn to reach this level than we do.

Don't get me wrong, I am absolutely NOT condoning child marriage nor to I AT ALL support it. My point is that in different times, different norms were accepted. Phil Robertson is living in an out-dated mode. Imagine that.