Fact Check: Has Tennessee legalise child marriage?

A piece of news is getting viral that Tennessee legislation will legalize child marriage. Social media is flooded with such posts. These posts claim that Tennessee Republicans are advancing a marry little kids’ bill that will allow them to marry children of any age.

Further, many other social media users have criticized the news.

Fact Check

On our fact check analysis we found that there was an amendment in the Tennessee marriage law. This amendment added the phrase “who have both attained the age of majority,” which is 18 in their law.

Further on our analysis, we got to know that the bill will set a higher required age for common-law marriages than that needed to obtain a marriage license, which is 17 in their law.

Leatherwood’s office has not stated the reason for the amendment or the omission of the age requirement in the initial version yet.

Conclusion

Tennessee has not legalized child marriage. Hence, the viral news is fake.

DFRAC Editor

Digital Forensics, Research and Analytics Centre (DFRAC) is a non-partisan and independent media organisation which focuses on fact-checking and identifying hate speech. With the popularisation of the internet came the challenge of information overload and often times, our feeds are overpopulated with conflicting, incendiary and false information which is increasingly becoming difficult to ignore and not believe in

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