Posted on 01/05/2014 1:53:12 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
In modern America, sex is increasingly where it should be: outside the reach of government. Anti-sodomy statutes have been tossed by the Supreme Court. Contraception is widely accessible. Anyone with a computer can gorge on pornography without fear of prosecution.
Same-sex marriage has been legalized in 18 states and the District of Columbia. Now another step has been taken to expel police and legislators from the bedrooms of consenting adults: a federal court decision striking down a key element of Utah's ban on polygamy.
Last month, District Judge Clark Waddoups ruled that the law infringes not only on constitutionally protected sexual privacy but on the free exercise of religion. Utah, he concluded, doesn't have to issue multiple marriage licenses to Kody Brown and his consorts, who appear in the reality TV show "Sister Wives." But it can't dictate their living arrangements.
The group belongs to a renegade Mormon sect that regards polygamy as sanctioned by God. Brown is legally married to one of the women and "spiritually married" to the other three. Together, at last count, they have 17 children.
If a man and a woman want to live together and call themselves partners, buddies, teammates, friends with benefits or Bonnie and Clyde, the government will leave them alone. Ditto if a guy can entice several fertile females to shack up with him and spawn a noisy horde of offspring.
But in Utah, it matters what the man calls the women living with him. If he refers to them as wives, he can go to prison. The law covers not only formal polygamous marriage but any relationships in which a married person "purports to marry another person or cohabits with another person." That was the provision ruled unconstitutional....
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
Do you think the federal government should have been forced to recognize polygamy as legal marriage?
Does that also mean that married couples could no longer file a joint return. What about the rule protecting a spouse from testifying against the other in court? Do the courts have any say about custody and visitation in divorce cases? Is state sanctioned divorce even possible? How does division of property get adjudicated? If we are just cohabitating, then how can there be any common property?
Before people had to get government marriage licenses, that's when. You see, they went to this thing called a Church. And that's where they were married, and that's where their marriage record was kept.
Then this new, stylish lefty trend showed up, where people had to register their vows before God with the government, and request permission for that government to review their relationship with God, and grant it or deny it.
Which brings up the question - have you received proper government approval for your relationship with God? Can you produce your religion license, or are you just one of those wild-eyed, unlicensed quacks?
civil marriage has been around a couple thousand years or more and has been the foundation of civilization
now some morons want to get rid of the foundation of civilization
I don’t care if these people live together, the state should never recognize this arrangement as a “marriage”
Without civilization there can be no ‘we the people’.There have never been any civilizations without government enforcement of ‘personal relationships’.
And Man hasn’t changed. Not in recorded history.
But maybe something happened recently, if so I’d like to know what it is.
Well said.
The problem with those of the Libertarian bent, the ones who are trying to surrender the fight to defend marriage and the natural family for us, is that they utterly fail to recognize a number of critically important things:
1) The fundamental nature of the marriage bond and its character as the basis for all human civilization, governance and economy.
2) The moral depravity that homosexuality, and polygamy, represent.
3) The fact that if you give government over to moral depravity you will have destroyed the possibility of republican, constitutional self-government.
Our first President:
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim tribute to patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness — these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. . . . reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.”
— George Washington
Our second President:
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net.”
— John Adams
Our third President:
“No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and . . . . their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice . . . . These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government.”
— Thomas Jefferson
Our fourth President:
“The aim of every political Constitution, is or ought to be first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.”
— James Madison
My point is that recognition of marriage is no business of the State at all. You are conflating government with civilization and society. That's what liberals do. Government is not civilization, and it's not society. It's government - and in America, at least, it's supposed to be severely limited. Starting with religion.
But two same-sex people can get married? Because there are now 19 states (and counting) that say they can.
Those states are wrong, of course.
Abolishing marriage is the goal of the perverts
It is also the goal of libertopians
They are one and the same group
They are enemies of civilization
Libertarians and socialists are both enemies of civilization.
They are both my enemies.
My point is that while wrong, polygamy has an historical basis, same sex marriage has NEVER been done legally in the history of mankind, to my knowledge. If the worse of the two is now legal in almost half of the states, how in the world can society ban the other?
The first federal law regarding legal marriage was passed by the Continental Congress in 1780, it was added to in 1794 and 1798, were they wrong to not include whatever any religion or cult, or church wanted to call “marriage”?
Should they have been forced to recognize polygamy, should any American state or court have been recognizing gay marriage and polygamy because some churches or religions approved of it?
It is the same with marrying kids and the libertopians are going to be on that like white on rice next.
“But maybe something happened recently, if so I’d like to know what it is.”
The state’s definition of marriage has changed in 18 states so far, with 6 or so in the last year, to accept ‘gay marriage.’ The demonstrable inclination of the state to use its powers punish those who don’t buy into the state’s most current impossible definition of marriage.
Seems to me that’s a pretty big change. No one would have believed you 20 years ago if you would have told them that, anyhow.
Freegards
Do you think two wrongs make a right?
Add to your list the first platform of the Republican Party, 1856, condemning “those twin relics of barbarism — polygamy and slavery.”
Yes, as a mater of fact, something did happen recently. About 230 years ago, a country was founded on exactly the opposite principles that you just cited. You see, the Founder of this country based it on the single idea that We the People came first - before civilization. And that We the People have God-given rights that exist before civilization. And that by acknowledging these God-given, pre-existing rights, civilization can then be created out of them, by forming a severely limited government that comes after these rights, and is subject to these rights, and is limited by these rights. And that then, and only then, can what results be properly called the civilization God wants us all to live in.
And you're right - man hasn't changed. But for the first time in thousands of years, a country has arisen that actually acknowledges what man really is - a being created by God, with inherent, pre-existing, God-given rights. And that is new, astonishing, and just the change you are looking for, because it means that all of previous human history, all those previous cultures that called themselves civilized, were wrong. And not only wrong, but dead wrong - absolutely backwards.
Welcome to America. You might want to read up a little bit more on what it's about before you comment on a website called "Free Republic."
Ah yes mr. Young...and lead us not into Temptation
How consenting adults choose to order their private lives is none of the States business. None whatsoever.
That's way too much individual freedom for millions of people.
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