The FFRF Action Fund is celebrating a major victory for children’s rights and secular advocacy as Maine officially bans child marriage.
While the bill was disappointingly not signed by Gov. Janet Mills, the bill passed without the need for a gubernatorial signature.
The FFRF Action Fund has been a vocal advocate for ending child marriage across the United States, emphasizing that no child should be subjected to coercion or denied their full rights under the law due to outdated religious or cultural traditions. With this decision, Maine joins a growing number of states — including Virginia, where the FFRF Action Fund successfully advocated for a similar ban — in recognizing the urgent need to protect minors from forced or exploitative marriages.
“Child marriage is a human rights violation that has no place in a just and secular society, and even there there are child marriage bans, they often have exceptions for those undertaken by religious sects,” says FFRF Action Fund President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “We applaud Maine for taking this important step and urge the remaining states to follow suit in protecting vulnerable children from religiously and culturally motivated harm.”
Before this ban, Maine had worked toward ending child marriage by raising the marriage age to 16 in 2020, then raising it to 17 in 2023. The new legislation closes the legal loopholes that allow parents to allow 17-year-old girls to enter marriage — often under religious pressures — before they reach adulthood. Research shows that child marriage is linked to increased rates of domestic abuse, lower educational attainment and economic instability.
Unchained at Last, a survivor-led nonprofit organization dedicated to ending forced and child marriage in the United States, found that 1,174 minors were wed in Maine between 2000 and 2023 — and roughly 77 percent were girls wed to adult men. Before the 2020 law, Maine allowed a parent to marry off a child of any age.
FFRF Action Fund will continue its advocacy efforts to push for national legislative reforms and call on lawmakers in the 36 remaining states and three territories to follow Maine’s lead in abolishing child marriage.
FFRF Action Fund is a 501(c)(4) organization that develops and advocates for legislation, regulations and government programs to preserve the constitutional principle of separation between state and church. It also advocates for the rights and views of nonbelievers, endorses candidates for political office, and publicizes the views of elected officials concerning religious liberty issues.