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(Aleteia) - The cast of “Sister Wives,” a hit television show featuring a polygamous family, has something to celebrate today. On Wednesday, Federal Judge Clark Waddoups finalized his December order striking down a key part of Utah’s statute banning the practice of bigamy.
Kody Brown, his four “wives” and their 17 children are Lehi, Utah, residents and members of the Apostolic United Brethren, a fundamentalist Mormon sect that continues to practice polygamy, which in 1890 was formally eschewed by the official Mormon Church, also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS). That decision was critical to the recognition of the Utah territory as an American state in 1896. The ban on polygamy is written into both the Utah Constitution and statutory law.
In 2010, the television network TLC began broadcasting a reality show that examined the lives of the Brown family. The day after the program debuted, Utah Attorney General Jeff Buhman directed police in Lehi to investigate the Browns for a possible felony violation of the state’s bigamy statute. A criminal case was never brought, but the Browns hired celebrity lawyer Jonathan Turley and sued the state on the grounds that the investigation had violated their constitutional privacy and religious rights.
At issue in Brown v. Buhman was a key provision of Utah’s bigamy statute. In the Brown family there is only one legal marriage license, the one between Kody Brown and his original wife, Meri. According to the family, the other three “marriages,” while not legal contracts, were validated according to the rites of the Apostolic United Brethren and Mormon tradition. Though “spiritual,” the family claims, they are no less marriages than the legal one between Kody and Meri.
The problem is that the Utah statute anticipated these sorts of claims by polygamous families. In addition to obtaining multiple concurrent marriage licenses, it includes those who “purport to marry” or “cohabitate” with multiple partners as bigamists and therefore felons. It was on this basis that Utah defended its statute, and it was also on this basis that Judge Waddoups ruled.
In his 91-page judgment, Waddoups notes “the incongruity between criminalizing religious cohabitation but not adulterous cohabitation, or rather selectively prosecuting the former while not prosecuting the latter at all, demonstrates that the cohabitation prong is not narrowly tailored to advance a compelling state interest.” In other words, the state has no real interest in cohabitation apart from marriage, or else it would be investigating and prosecuting all couples who live together. Instead, the state only acts when cohabitation is practiced as marriage in a religiously-motivated polygamous family...
Complete article here.
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This doesn't make much sense to say it is a creep towards polygamy. They aren't going to formally recognize the marriages, and the point made- that they don't prosecute adulterers, cohabitators, etc... is true. Civil marriage is a joke and Christians ought to be able to get married without reference to it. The marriage license is actually just a ticket for the divorce industry. They'll keep it the parties down to two, not for tradition's sake, but because multiple parties to a divorce would reduce their revenues.
ReplyDeleteEventually the logic will find that people living together, having kids together, calling each other husband and wife, and all these children calling these adults moms and dads is not an offense against the "public good" and there will be no legal reason to criminalize concurrent marriages. This is just a step (a creeping step) towards that eventual logical resolution to the disagreement.
DeleteFrom what I understand, polygamy was never legalized in Rome, though they did get to the point where people could marry goats. This suggests to me these incessant marriages and divorces are a perversion of the courts in favor of those who profit every time the courts get involved, and that multiple partner relationships are unlikely to be formally recognized because the claims each partner has on the family assets reduces the amount that the divorce industry can extract. So to me the logic looks like, what's good for the lawyers?
Deleteanother one support for traditional marriage!
ReplyDeleteThis blog once posted a video that shows that once the potential for procreation is removed from marriage, marriage becomes a mere contract between two. But, it is arbitrary then to limit that contract to only a couple. Polygamy is on the horizon now that we have "gay marriage." I imagine Mormons and Muslims et al. will start pushing for this.
ReplyDelete