It takes real effort to hurt children, adults, and senior citizens all in less than a month, but it’s just another day’s work for the radical Republicans clogging up the country’s state legislatures. From protecting child predators to keeping you working until you’re nearly 70, the GOP is obsessed with manipulating legal age requirements to reshape public policy.
In some cases, that means rewriting the laws to help your relatives, like Utah Sen. Stuart Adams did when he initiated a change to the state’s age-of-consent laws after his 18-year-old relative was charged with raping a 13-year-old girl. Though the changed law didn’t retroactively apply to the case, the judge, the case’s prosecutor, and the defense attorney each acknowledged that it led to a more lenient resolution for the 18-year-old.
For a party that can’t shut up about supposedly protecting kids, the GOP is willing to defend indefensible institutions like child marriage even when it hurts them politically. That was the case in Missouri, where Democrats and breakaway GOP lawmakers forced ban on child marriage through the legislature, despite years of Republican opposition that even Gov. Mike Kehoe found too repulsive to bear.
Kehoe hardly needed the moral awakening. He could have just read the polls, which showed voters recoiling from GOP lawmakers like state Rep. Hardy Billington, who claimed abortion rates would “triple” if adult men couldn’t marry young girls. But Billington’s bogus argument gives away the real reason Republicans are tinkering with the age of consent: It’s one more lever for advancing their extreme social and economic agenda.
Look beyond red states’ collapsing age of consent laws and you’ll see GOP legislatures passing age loopholes that make a mockery of federal child-labor laws. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ quest to replace migrants’ “dirt cheap” labor means children as young as 14 could soon work overnight shifts at places like McDonalds. The state’s Republican lawmakers are also toying with stripping 16- and 17-year-old workers of their right to a meal break.
If marriage begins at conception and kids can enter the workforce before they enter high school, it’s fair to ask when these red states’ hard-working child brides get to retire. Thanks to even more Republican age games, the answer to that question is: probably never! The Republican Study Committee, a major conservative caucus in the House, recently proposed raising the retirement age to 69, cutting Social Security benefits for over 250 million Americans.
For Republicans, you’re basically never too young to marry or too old to work—and boy, does the White House have some interesting jobs lined up for the seniors who have no choice but to work through their golden years.
On Wednesday, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement announced it was eliminating its age cap in an effort to grow the ranks of President Donald Trump’s hateful deportation force. The announcement came with a predictably tone-deaf X post in which ICE encouraged fathers and sons to enlist and deport people together. You know, family values but with a swirl of blood-and-soil fascism.
Trump’s political cronies are so eager to play with the meaning of age because fascism is, at its core, a movement that distorts plain meanings to serve twisted purposes. Does anyone really agree that a 13-year-old girl and a 23-year-old woman are legally indistinct for the purposes of sex and marriage? Does anyone believe a 14-year-old is best served when the state allows them to pull the graveyard shift at Circle K?
Republicans may smudge laws to make indefensible realities into legally acceptable truths, but actually believing it means rejecting the evidence of your eyes and smothering your conscience. Age has become just one more negotiable reality in the fascist right’s unending cultural siege, and the MAGA movement is using it to manipulate our collective reality into a funhouse distortion. If the American people want to make it through the madness, they’ll need to reject the GOP’s partisan mind games.