12-Year-Old Wives, Hanging People ‘On A Tree,’ Arizona Drug Money Laundering, Just GOP doing Business
That famous chicken-beheading, Bible-thumping, Missouri state representative is back in the news and now he’s pushing to allow children as young as 12 to be allowed to marry with parental permission.
The chicken mauler is a 64-year-old Republican, solid anti-abortion member of the Missouri state senate with the unlikely name of Mike Moon. Moon gained considerable attention and ridicule in 2017, when he posted a video of himself butchering chickens on his family farm on social media, chiding fellow Missouri legislators for not getting to the “heart of the matter” and abolishing abortion in Missouri.
Critics of the video included NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri, as well as PETA. Moon, a farmer who also owns 80 cattle and a flock of chickens and goats, said he wasn’t trying to offend anyone by the video, but that “It was just something that I was in the middle of and I wasn’t going to go shower or change clothes.”
Moon, elected to the state senate in 2013, is now running for congress and while he hasn’t publicly lopped off any chicken heads lately he did draw cutting persiflage when he suggested at a recent state hearing that children as young as 12 could put away their Barbies and be allowed to marry pre-teen boys who would also have to shelve his GI-Joes for the sake of matrimony. Moon said his plan would give parents more oversight over their children but his rationale was flimsy, to say the least.
“Do you know any kids who have been married at age 12? I do. And guess what? They’re still married,” Moon said in response to questioning by Democratic state Representative Peter Meredith.
Moon’s lunatic comments came during a debate on Tuesday over a bill to ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors. How Moon segued to allowing pre-teens to marry is a mystery.
But the moon man is consistent. In 2018, he opposed a bill to raise the marriage age from 15 to 16, with parental permission. The bill passed but Moon back then thought it would be OK for 12 years old to get married and cited the same mysterious couple who Moon said were married as pre-teens and have been happily wed ever since.
What makes Mr. Moon’s proposal so odd is that he also has introduced bills allowing parents to not have their children participate in sex education classes, requiring Internet service providers to ban “obscene” websites, and prohibiting doctors from giving transgender patients sex reassignment surgery or hormonal treatment. But as far as pre-teens marrying and getting pregnant, that’s OK for Mr. Moon.
As of Aug. 1, 2018, the age of consent throughout the nation was 16 years, 17 years, or 18 years.
Moon’s point of view is more suited to 18th century England. English civil law at the time set the minimum age of marriage for girls at 12 and 14 for boys. The Lunar Guy also would have fit in well in 19th century Delaware, where the age of consent was lowered in 1887 from 10 to 7 years old. At the time, 37 states allowed kids to marry at 10 years old while 10 states set the age of consent at 12.
In California, early statutes forbade sexual intercourse with girls under the age of 10 although the minimum age was hiked to 14 in 1889 and then boosted up to the ripe old age of 16 in 1897.
In the late-19th century, Christian feminist reform groups campaigned to raise the age of consent to 16, with the goal of raising it ultimately to 18. By 1920, 26 states had an age of consent of 16, 21 states had an age of consent of 18, and one state (Georgia) had an age of consent of 14. Georgia raised the age of consent to 16 in 1995.
Alaska became the 49th state in 1959, with the age of consent at 16 years. Hawaii became the 50th state qalso in 1959, with the age of consent at 14 years. Hawaii raised the consent age to 16 in 2001. Colorado had lowered the consent age to 18 and then in 1971, dropped it again to 15 years old. Kansas has a minimum age of 15.
Six states have no official minimum age, but require parental consent, court approval or both. The states include California, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Washington.
Moon, who has degrees from Baptist Bible College and Missouri State University, is no stranger to strange requests. In 2019, Moon asked Gov. Mike Parson to remove a statue of the Roman goddess Ceres from the top of the Missouri Capitol in Jefferson City, calling the statue a “false god.” In ancient Roman religion, Ceres was a goddess of agriculture, grain crops, fertility and motherly relationships. The 1,407 pound, 10-feet-four inch bronze statue was installed on Oct. 29, 1924.
“If we chose to erect a statue of Jesus on, or in, some state property, there would likely be an outcry from those who disagree with our choice. Those who would oppose the statue of Jesus are the same who would argue in support of placing a false god on our Capitol’s dome. Should we not stand firm in our beliefs as well by refusing to honor a pagan god?” Moon wrote to Parson.
Ceres remains proudly at the Missouri Capitol.
Moon, co-chair of the Missouri chapter of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, also introduced a bill in 2019 to redefine a fertilized egg as a person and effectively turn any attempt to terminate a pregnancy into murder.
Ever the rebel, Moon was stripped of most of his committee assignments recently as punishment for wearing overalls to the chamber floor and other alleged violations of decorum.
The Missouri Assembly punishes its members only for the harshest transgressions, like wearing overalls. One member lost his assignments last year after he was indicted and another was censured by the House for lying about a relationship with an intern. A third member, accused of sexual abuse by his children, was never given assignments. But he did not wear overalls.
Missouri is not the only state that has taken to scolding and punishing its members. We all know about the two African American Democrats who were kicked out of the Tennessee state legislature and then restored to their seats after they supposedly disrupted decorum by demonstrating for gun controls.
Also in Tennessee, Republican State Rep. Paul Sherrell has been kicked off the House Justice Committee after he suggested last month that “hanging on a tree” should be the state’s method of capital punishment. It was a somewhat insensitive remark in a state that has been infamous for lynching its African American residents.
Since taking office on Nov. 8, 2016, Sherrell has done more than his part to bring shame on his state. He is co-sponsor of a bill to rename part of a Nashville street after Donald Trump. The street was re-named in 2021 after the late civil rights icon, U.S Rep. John Lewis, D-Tenn. Lewis was a leader of the 1960 sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in downtown Nashville which resulted in Nashville becoming the first city to admit Blacks to previously segregated public places.
Sherrill, 64, evidently believes trump’s actions merit the honor of a street renaming. Those actions amount to a 30-minute speech he delivered at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium in May 2017, followed by a visit to a plantation where President Andrew Jackson once kept 200 slaves. Trump laid a wreath on Jackson’s tomb on what would have been Old Hickory’s 250th birthday.
Among Sherrill’s other lurid actions was when he was one of only two state legislators who voted against a 2022 bill requiring schools to include Black history and Black culture in their curriculums in grades five through eight. He also co-sponsored a 2020 bill that allows private adoption and foster agencies to reject gay couples.
And that brings us to Arizona, the unflinching haven and lynchpin of trump’s false claims over voter fraud in the 2020 election. Arizona Republicans include the likes of such far right, luminaries and trump followers, like Kari Lake, Wendy Rogers, Blake Masters and Mark Finchem.
If anyone could bring further ignominy upon the Arizona GOP, it is now-former, first term state Rep. Liz Harris who was expelled from the Arizona House of Representatives after she presented a witness that accused fellow Republicans of baseless conspiracy theories, including “money laundering, drug trafficking, public corruption, bribery of public officials and election fraud.”
The House Ethics Committee determined that Harris had to go because she damaged “the institutional integrity of the House” by inviting insurance agent Jacqueline Breger to testify at an election integrity hearing.
Harris promotes QAnon conspiracies and runs a website devoted to baseless 2020 election fraud conspiracies. Breger rattled off a series of wild, unproven conspiracy theories, including that Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and other public officials accepted bribes from the Sinaloa drug cartel, and that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints controlled state agencies.
Hobbs later said she had no involvement in the Sinaloa cartel, has taken no bribes and isn’t laundering drug money.
The Sinaloa Cartel is a large, international organized crime syndicate that specializes in illegal drug trafficking and money laundering. It was established in Mexico during the late 1980s.
Harris even drew criticism from Republican Sen. Wendy Rogers, one of the state’s most notorious election deniers.
Rogers said in a statement that none of those Breger accused of accepting bribes “had charges filed, had prosecutions pending, nor had any convictions against them.”