It's telling, imo, that the legal age for sexual consent has remained just sixteen or seventeen in 38 of the 50 states, including NC. There have been some Republican state legislators in recent years who have fought raising the legal marriage age in their states to 18. A New Hampshire Republican legislator in 2024 said in a speech that under-18 girls were "ripe" and "fertile" and opposed raising the legal marriage age in NH to 18 (previously, girls in NH as young as 13 could marry with permission from a judge). In 2023 a Missouri Republican legislator, in proposing a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors, said that he knew 12-year-old girls who had gotten married and who were still married - even as he claimed his proposed ban on gender-affirming care was being done to "protect" minors. A Missouri Democrat pointed out the obvious contradiction in his claims to be protecting minors while he was apparently OK with 12-year-olds being allowed to marry.
I do think there still exists in some parts of the country - mainly more rural and socially conservative areas - the idea that underage girls dating or marrying much older men isn't such a bad thing. When Roy Moore was defeated (barely) in that notorious 2017 Alabama special Senate election for sexually harassing, dating, and assaulting underage girls when he was in his thirties and forties (including hanging around his local shopping mall in his mid-thirties trying to hit on and pick up underage girls at the mall) there were stories in some articles about that election in which conservative religious voters in Alabama implied that underage girls dating much older men wasn't such a big deal. I remember one of the women who said Moore had sexually assaulted her in his car when she was underage said in an article that her own mother had told her that she was "lucky" that such a powerful and important older man (Moore was an assistant DA at the time) was showing a romantic interest in her. And Franklin Graham defended Moore and attacked his critics, asserting that they were "guilty of doing much worse than what he has been accused of supposedly doing" and another Alabama preacher defended Moore by saying that he was a "veteran" who had returned from military service to find that most women his age were already married, so he had sought out "the purity of young [underage] women."
I heard some similar sentiments growing up in rural NC, although I would also point out that plenty of others disagreed. I do think there is a larger number of people who privately still believe underage girls being preyed on by older men isn't such a big deal, as disgusting as that is.
