Or maybe you won’t be. WaPo has a very interesting article today about the guy who, as Speaker of the House, helped pass the 1864 law that bans all abortion in Arizona:
The time has come to reflect on the life and times — especially the times — of William Claude Jones.
Jones was a “prevaricator, a poet, a politician and the pursuer of nubile young females,” according to a 1990 article published in the Journal of Arizona History, which appears to be the most comprehensive biographical report published on the life of the 19th-century rogue.
Barf.
The article doesn’t mention the age of his first wife. But the age of his second?
His next wife was a girl whose name was believed to be Maria v. del Refugio, writes L. Boyd Finch, the author of the journal article. New Mexico’s delegate to Washington, Miguel Otero, was bothered by the union. He “declared that the bride was twelve years old,” Finch writes, “and that Jones had ‘abducted’ her.” Otero petitioned President James Buchanan to fire Jones for the moral failing, but Jones resigned instead.
But wait! There’s more!
No matter! The mid-19th century was, by any standard you or I would recognize, a hideous place for women. The predatory relationship did not end Jones’s political career; he merely moved farther west, to the Arizona territory. There, Jones supported secession from the Southern states in the impending Civil War. He also landed upon his third wife, Caroline Stephens, who was 15 years old. Claude, by this time, was around 50.
He eventually cut out though, before finding his FOURTH wife:
He had boarded a train for California, and then a boat for Hawaii, where he again entered local politics, winning a seat in the kingdom’s lower house. By 1868, a local girl named MaeMae Kailihao — “reportedly a princess from a noble family” — was pregnant with his child. She was 14.
She died at 28, and history doesn’t relate the age of his fifth wife. Mercifully he died before raping any more teenagers.
…
I don’t think it’s news that these sorts of conservative moralists are almost always deeply gross men who think of women as property. But it’s sometimes nice to know that this isn’t just a recent thing. It’s ALWAYS been this way.