Posted on 01/15/2004 9:57:51 PM PST by kattracks
Three adults who want to live together as a husband and two wives asked a federal court this week to strike down Utah's ban on polygamy as a violation of their constitutional rights.
The plaintiffs are G. Lee Cook and D. Cook, a married husband and wife, and J. Bronson, the woman who wants to join them in a "plural marriage." According to the lawsuit filed on their behalf by the Utah Civil Rights & Liberties Foundation, the Cooks and Bronson share "sincere and deeply held religious beliefs" in polygamy as it was practiced in the early decades of the Mormon Church. Acting on those beliefs, the three of them went on Dec. 22 to the Salt Lake County Clerk's Office, where Mr. Cook and Ms. Bronson applied for a marriage license. But since Cook acknowledged that he was already married -- his wife was right there with him -- the license was refused.
"The law makes it very clear that they can't be married to more than one person," the county clerk told the Salt Lake Tribune. "We're here issuing licenses according to the law." That law is written right into Utah's constitution, which declares: "Polygamous or plural marriages are forever prohibited." And that, the plaintiffs argue, deprives them of their religious freedom and privacy rights under the Constitution.
It's an open-and-shut case, of course. They haven't got a prayer.
Or have they?
Last June, in Lawrence v. Texas, the US Supreme Court overturned a Texas anti-sodomy law on the grounds that the Constitution protects "an autonomy of self that includes freedom of . . . certain intimate conduct." Five months later, guided in part by Lawrence, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that the age-old ban on same-sex marriage was "incompatible with the constitutional principles of respect for individual autonomy." The essence of civil marriage, said the SJC in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, is simply "the exclusive and permanent commitment of the married partners to one another."
Well, if that, constitutionally speaking, is what makes a marriage -- the intimate union of permanently committed partners -- why shouldn't the trio in Utah be allowed to marry? On what principled ground can they be denied the protections and benefits of matrimony?
To be sure, Utah isn't Massachusetts and federal court isn't the SJC. But logic is logic. If judges in one jurisdiction can decide that the right to marry includes the right to change the very definition of marriage, judges in another jurisdiction can do the same thing.
Some advocates argue that it is insulting to compare a homosexual person's wish for a same-sex spouse with a polygamist's wish for multiple spouses. "Gay people are not asking for the right to marry anyone," writes Andrew Sullivan, a leading champion of same-sex marriage. "We're asking for the right to marry someone. Would-be polygamists already have a legal option: to marry a single other person."
But of course gay people have always had exactly the same option. They are free to marry someone of the opposite sex, and throughout history, countless homosexuals have done exactly that. Nevertheless, Sullivan claims, for gays and lesbians, opposite-sex marriage "is no meaningful option at all."
Isn't that exactly what the Utah plaintiffs would say about binary marriage? According to a "doctrinal overview" they filed with the court, so-called fundamentalist Mormons regard plural marriage as "a doctrine revealed by God, obedience to which is necessary for their desired eternal exaltation." A freakish notion? Until very recently, that is what the vast majority of Americans thought about same-sex marriage, too.
The implication of Lawrence and Goodridge is that the only people entitled to decide whether an intimate relationship is meaningful enough to deserve legal protection are the parties to that relationship themselves. If other courts follow suit, the damage inflicted on marriage as we know it -- indeed, on the social order as we know it -- will be considerable.
This is why the power to define marriage has always been vested in the political branches of government, not the courts. The Massachusetts Constitution is explicit on the point. Part 2, Chapter III, Article V: "All causes of marriage, divorce, and alimony . . . shall be heard and determined by the Governor and Council, until the Legislature shall, by law, make other provisions." As recently as 1999, the Supreme Judicial Court acknowledged that marriage was the Legislature's domain. "We recognize a family may no longer be constituted simply of a wage-earning father, his dependent wife, and the couple's children," the SJC said in Connors v. City of Boston, but "adjustments in the legislation to reflect these new social and economic realities must come from the Legislature."
The question for the Massachusetts Legislature is whether it will reclaim its authority to say what marriage means, or meekly submit to the high court's power play. Lawmakers, too, take an oath to uphold the Constitution, and they have a duty to resist when judges overstep their bounds. When they fail to do so, the fallout can spread far and wide. The lawsuit filed Monday in Salt Lake City is just a taste of things to come.
©2003 Boston Globe
I wasn't talking about mistresses. Nor was I talking about modern Europe, which shares that peculiar cultural trait.
And, they've pretty much all slidden into a cultural cesspool as a result.
Our own free republic is no exception - we are increasingly slipping into third-worldism, a nation totally unrecognizable in every way by its founders.
The same argument could be (and probably was) made in the case of children conceived and born within the "Heather Has Two Mommies" construct. Didn't seem to help. Further, a case could be made that children born into a polygamous family could even do better at least financially than a single mother/father family. For example, the father and one mother works while the other mother stays home and takes care of the children.
I don't think this argument holds much water. First of all, in some poyygamous cultures, men marry several sisters all at the same time, so there's no "old" ones and "new" ones. Second, many times (theoretically) women could say - and think - that they like the arrangement. In fact, in the article posted above, the man went in to procure a marriage license with his current wife and the prospective bride at the same time. No protest from wifey #1 apparently.
Yes, exactly. I've been exposed to polygamy in many parts of the world, and in families that were well-educated and modern. The women are quite happy with the arrangement most times; it has its advantages. Having seen polygamy as practiced by many different cultures around the world first-hand, I have a hard time condemning it generally. It functions quite well, and some of the arguments I've heard, even from the women, are actually fairly compelling and rational. Or to put it another way, polygamous marriages seem to function as well as monogamous marriages, generally speaking, and have the same number of problems. Women that get involved in polygamous marriages are something of a self-selecting population and are usually acclimatized to the way those things work in practice.
I think part of the problem with the discussion on this forum is that people here are projecting all sorts of odd perceptions of polygamy onto the basic issue. It isn't like most people here seem to think it is. The people that do this in various cultures aren't clueless or evil, and there are many fine men and women in healthy and functional polygamous marriages. It may be different and "weird", but there isn't anything intrinsically broken or immoral about it conceptually and as is typically practiced.
Heck, if it is that fluid one might as well not even bother with marriage.
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