What I see going on here is institutionally indoctrinated judges wrongly basing the constitutionality of a state's marriage policy on PC interpretations of the 14th Amendment's (14A) Equal Protections Clause (EPC).
First, are equal protections coded into Utah's laws?
Next, many states have incorporated language from the Constitution into their own constitutions. The problem with doing so is that wrong, PC interpretations of the federal Constitution then follow into interpretations of state laws.
Regarding state marriage equality laws which use language from the Constitution's EPC, please consider the following. Since pro-gay activist judges are now using the federal EPC as a wild card to force the nation to comply with arbitrary rights, marriage rights in this example, that the states have actually never amended the Constitution to expressly protect, such interpretations are then blindly applied to similar language in state constitutions.
The problem is that the federal EPC was never intended to be used for such a purpose. This is evidenced by the excerpts below, one of the excerpts a clarification of 14A by John Bingham, the main author of Section 1 of 14A where the EPC appears. Bingham had indicated that 14A applies to the states only those rights which the states have amended the Constitution to expressly protect.
The other excerpt is a clarification of 14A by the Supreme Court which reflects what Bingham had said.
“Mr. Speaker, this House may safely follow the example of the makers of the Constitution and the builders of the Republic, by passing laws for enforcing all the privileges and immunities of the United States as guaranteed by the amended Constitution and expressly enumerated in the Constitution [emphasis added].” — Congressional Globe, House of Representatives, 42nd Congress, 1st Session. (See lower half of third column.)
“3. The right of suffrage was not necessarily one of the privileges or immunities of citizenship before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, and that amendment does not add to these privileges and immunities. It simply furnishes additional guaranty for the protection of such as the citizen already had [emphasis added].” —Minor v. Happersett, 1874.
So since the states have never amended the Constitution to make gay marriage a protected right, the states are actually free to make laws which discriminate against gay agenda issues like gay marriage, imo, as long as such laws do not unreasonably abridge constitutionally enumerated rights.
The problem is that, as evidenced by this Utah issue, the states have the 10th Amendment-protected power to misinterpret constitutionally enumerated rights - to an extent - and then to unthinkingly apply such misinterpretations to their own laws, especially when state laws contain language borrowed from the Constitution. But it remains that state laws cannot unreasonably abridge enumerated protections.
What a mess! :^(
They were prohibiting “cohabitation” in addition to polygamy. That’s actually what was struck down.