Posted on 07/12/2011 12:17:04 PM PDT by ConjunctionJunction
Kody Brown is a proud polygamist, and a relatively famous one. Now Mr. Brown, his four wives and 16 children and stepchildren are going to court to keep from being punished for it.
The family is the focus of a reality TV show, “Sister Wives,” that first appeared in 2010. Law enforcement officials in the Browns’ home state, Utah, announced soon after the show began that the family was under investigation for violating the state law prohibiting polygamy.
On Wednesday, the Browns are expected to file a lawsuit to challenge the polygamy law.
The lawsuit is not demanding that states recognize polygamous marriage. Instead, the lawsuit builds on a 2003 United States Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down state sodomy laws as unconstitutional intrusions on the “intimate conduct” of consenting adults. It will ask the federal courts to tell states that they cannot punish polygamists for their own “intimate conduct” so long as they are not breaking other laws, like those regarding child abuse, incest or seeking multiple marriage licenses.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Um, “we told you so”
Crazy wacko rightwingers are right. Whodathunkit?
Next up, bestiality and pedophilia legalized. (What? I’m going too far? Its not a slippery slope?)
oh dear! I suppose now that so many states have played same sex marriage, the p9polygamists are riled enough for a grand battle for polygamy! The ramifications begin!
The children of these perverts are, essentially, growing up in a brothel.
Also, I want to see the finances of this group. Welfare? Food stamps?
If he moves to New York or any of the other handful of nutball atates which recognize gay marriage, I really cannot see where there is any legal basis to tell him no.
And now it begins.
Anyone carefully reading the legal philosophies embedded in the legal arguments in favor of redefining marriage to include same-sex couples knows that the groundwork has been laid in those legal decisions in the courts that under those same arguments will make it difficult to deny legalizing polygamy.
The radicals knew exactly what they were doing and knew they laid the groundwork for approving the current challenge to traditional Judeo-Christian marriage.
The useful-idiot fellow travelers (Liberals), knowing only their “good intentions” claimed that approving such additional changes, like polygamy, was not their purpose. The radicals working behind the scenes and actually writing the legal language knew the Liberals claims were just that - their “good intentions”, not the legal groundwork that was actually being laid.
You cannot think that the cases for polygamy will be the end of it either.
IBTMC
(In Before The Mormon Comments)
The more the merrier. My friend explained that what's wrong with this country is once some group gets 'theirs' they want to deprive those coming after them of their 'theirs'. And that is so wrong! This could get interesting.
Well, turnabout is fair play.
Marriage wasn’t an issue of national law until the Democrats made it so. And they made it so in order to go after the polygamists and Mormons.
Now the Mormons have come full circule.
Oh, and the policy about going after the polygamists/Mormons and making marriage a national issue? Yea, that was brought about under the presidency of perhaps the only known homosexual POTUS we’ve had, James Buchanan, who also led us into the Civil War.
The irony is so thick, you can’t cut it with a chainsaw.
It would seem that Mr. Brown is facing an uphill battle.
The United States Supreme Court decision the case of Reynolds v. United States case (98 U.S. 145) is directly on point regarding the issue of polygamy. Citing from the decision, George Reynolds, Brigham Young's personal secretary, plead as follows:
On the trial, the plaintiff in error, the accused, proved that at the time of his alleged second marriage he was, and for many years before had been, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly called the Mormon Church, and a believer in its doctrines; that it was an accepted doctrine of that church "that it was the duty of male members of said church, circumstances permitting, to practise polygamy; . . . that this duty was enjoined by different books which the members of said church believed to be to divine origin, and among others the Holy Bible, and also that the members of the church believed that the practice of polygamy was directly enjoined upon the male members thereof by the Almighty God, in a revelation to Joseph Smith, the founder and prophet of said church; that the failing or refusing to practise polygamy by such male members of said church, when circumstances would admit, would be punished, and that the penalty for such failure and refusal would be damnation in the life to come." He also proved "that he had received permission from the recognized authorities in said church to enter into polygamous marriage; . . . that Daniel H. Wells, one having authority in said church to perform the marriage ceremony, married the said defendant on or about the time the crime is alleged to have been committed, to some woman by the name of Schofield, and that such marriage ceremony was performed under and pursuant to the doctrines of said church."A unanimous court rejected all of Reynolds' arguments, essentially ruling that Congress has a right to prohibit any activity it deems detrimental to society in general. If the question before the bar had involved the practice of polygamy by Mormons alone, then Reynolds would have prevailed. Since the question concerned the practice of polygamy by anybody, Reynolds lost. Reynolds was left with the only solution of "throwing the rascals out in an election and voting for representatives more sympathetic to his cause.
It has been some time since I Shepardized the decision, but I would be surprised if it is not still good law. It is my understanding this is one of the cases the Feds use to enforce the prohibition of other perverted religious practices such as animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, ritualized rape, child abuse, animal torture, drug abuse, and much more. Finally, I have been told that this case is high on the list of decisions the ACLU would like to see overturned.
Marriage wasn’t an issue of national law until the Democrats made it so. And they made it so in order to go after the polygamists and Mormons.
- - - -
Actually, it was the Republicans who made polygamy an issue (and went after the Mormons).
One of the founding principles of the Republican party was to do away with the ‘twin relics of barbarism - slavery and polygamy’.
Also, this same case was already attempted (and failed) by polygamist Tom Green a few years after Lawrence v. Texas.
It would be much better in the long run if polygamy became legal even before all of the states allowed gay marriage.
It might make them think twice, or at least just once, before supporting the oiling down of the slippery slope.
Marriage wasn’t an issue of national law until the Democrats made it so. And they made it so in order to go after the polygamists and Mormons.
______________________________________________
When did that happen ???
The Republican platform about that time was
The Twin Evils of Barbarism: Slavery and Polygamy
Polygamy was the sex slavery of women...
Didnt those women enslaved in polygamy have just as much right to live free as the black women ???
George Reynolds, Brigham Young’s personal secretary
____________________________________________
and yet when wife #19 Anna Webb tried to get a divorce from that same Brigham Young he was able to prove he was never legally married to her...
When the GOP was incorporating that into their platform, in 1856 they had no power to speak of.
In 1857, Jame Buchanan send US troops westward to confront the Mormons on the polygamy issue and replace Brigham Young as governor of the Utah Territory.
Lincoln, to my knowledge, never sent troops against the Mormons. He did sign the Morrill Act in 1862.
The case law being accumulated for homosexual marriage will eventually take marriage out of federal or public law and return it to the states, where they will likely be forced by full faith and credit to hew to federal case law. Polygamy is coming, and it likely won’t be a Mormon who wins the pivotal case, but a Muslim. Because we all know how DC steps and fetches for any perceived slight upon Muslims.
The courts would never restrict five gay men from living together, or five lesbians. Why then is it that a man and four women can’t live together?
Oh, wait...they can.
If they’re Muslims. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90857818
See, one rule for them and another for everyone else.
Since there is only one legal marriage they cannot be charged with Polygamy.
The guy has one wife and 3 live-in girlfriends.
Case closed.
Polygamy was “sex slavery” of women? Really?
Hmm. Remind me again where and when slave masters gave women the power to vote as the Mormons did.
Oh, and just in case you’re fuzzy on the history: Mormons gave women the franchise in 1870. About 50 years before most of the rest of the country, and only one year after the women’s suffrage movement started in neighboring Wyoming.
Mormon women were the ones who lit the fuse on women’s voting rights, and that’s one of the reasons why you see the first two states to give women the vote are in the west. The last states to give women the vote were on the east coast, with their oh-so-pious Christian sermonizing. They had to be forced by the 19th Amendment to give women suffrage. By that time, all the states west of the Rockies had long since done so.
Oh, and in case you’re further curious, women in Utah lost their right to vote in 1887 as a result of federal legislation passed in the further zealot prosecution of the anti-polygamy campaign of the time.
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