Not that I’m denying the amount of them in the US but there are also lots of anti-gay marriage religious morons here.
A friend was telling me that it is now illegal to marry someone with a >10yr age gap, but his parents are grandfathered in, so it won’t affect them. I cannot find anything on this online. Was I misinformed?
I mean, that would count against Taiwan, in keeping with my Maude tendencies.
uhm
You mean it’s now illegal to marry some with a >10 year age gap in Taiwan?
No it’s legal, but you can’t marry your second cousin or something like that here.
I do not think it is illegal but there seems to be social stigma and/or superstition associated with that, along the lines of not having two dogs or whistling at night.
A friend told you that? That’s just silly. He was probably just pulling your leg. Or maybe he was flirting with you (admittedly, using very odd technique, but lots of people’s flirting skills leave much to be desired).
That might be for marrying someone outside Taiwan, like southeast Asians. I think Taiwan passed a law making it illegal for a woman to marry a man who is more than 10 years older than her. Though I don’t know if it is in general or only for non-Taiwanese brides in Taiwan.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-brides-taiwan-idUSTP5166420070505
Police are cracking down though. A new law that forbids women from marrying Taiwan men more than 10 years their senior has hurt business for brokers, a Taipei-based matchmaker said
I know the Reuters article is pretty old but it says:
“But the popularity of Vietnamese brides is so great that there is now a prime time television show that broadcasts photographs and biographical data of prospective wives.”
Really? There was a tv program?
I’d like to see a source for that law. Is it supposed to be a Vietnamese law or a Taiwan law? Never heard of such a thing, and I seriously doubt that such a law could be passed in Taiwan. I know plenty of married couples with age differences of over 10 years.
A quick look at the marriage broker law yields nothing. 
http://law.moj.gov.tw/Eng/LawClass/LawAll.aspx?PCode=D0080168
Maybe it was just a policy of giving extra scrutiny to certain marriages, or a proposal that didn’t pass or did but has since been abolished.
I couldn’t find anything about it in Chinese either. You’d think something that big would leave some traces. Could just be more bad reporting from Ralph Jennings, or maybe the law was on the Vietnamese side, as the article doesn’t specify.
Please remember the background to regulations against such “arranged marriages” was mutual distrust, fallout from the infamous wife killer who derailed a train to kill his South East wife…when that did not kill her, he poisoned her. It was already his third one.
Such laws -like the residency laws for Chinese Mainland wives- were supposed to protect also those 60 or 70 year old veterans with juicy pensions… and an 18 year old imported bride.
Yes, there were such TV programs, prerecorded videos, ads placements on billboards, etc.
I used to see TV shows like that all the time in the early 2000s. Each woman shown on the screen would have a user ID number, so you could conveniently identify her when you called in to order yourself a bride. I haven’t subscribed to cable TV in the last dozen years, so I’m not sure if/when these kinds of shows stopped airing.
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Dentists
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