Strange Bedfellows: ABC Analyst Suggests Polygamy Ban Unconstitutional

NewsBusters ^ | Mark Finkelstein

[governsleastgovernsbest]

You might think MSM support for the raid by Texas state authorities on the polygamist compound in Eldorado would be a slam dunk. After all, the religion involved is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Not just Mormons: fundamentalists Mormons! Throw in patriarchy and allegations of exploitation of young women, and surely the feminist-inspired liberal media would be cheering on the bust.

But not so fast. Support this intervention, and perhaps a precedent is established for restrictions on unorthodox family arrangements of a more PC tint.

Take the comments of Jonathan Turley on today's Good Morning America. The George Washington law school professor went so far as to strongly suggest that the ban on polygamy is unconstitutional. And co-anchor Bill Weir was anything but unsympathetic to Turley's arguments.

View video.

[haroldeveryman]

Thanks for the link. That was spooky Warren Jeffs is evil. I was going to add that as in traditional marriage all partners must be of legal age, etc. but I didn’t want to get long winded.

Maybe polygamy can’t work outside of a tribal society. But before I declare it unconstitutional I would have to be convinced that polygamy necessarily entails mind control, pedophilia, and whacky religious cults.

[narses]

Once you get away from one man - one woman for life, it is indeed a slippery slope.

+

Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:

Add me / Remove me

Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of interest.

[NeoCaveman]

There are two possible lines of constitutional attack on anti-polygamy statutes. One derives from the First Amendment’s religion clauses. The other derives from Due Process “right to privacy” concepts — and in particular, from the Supreme Court’s recent holding in Lawrence v. Texas that adults have a privacy right that extends to private, consensual sex acts. In the end, neither of these lines of attack will — or should — be successful.

I've wondered for some time that a simultaneous attack along both lines might just work.

[Amendment10]

Regarding polygamy, there's nothing constitutional or unconstitutional about it. This is because the federal Constitution doesn't address polygamy, gay marriage, abortion, etc., not to say that the Constitution's silence about a given issue means that it's a constitutional dead-end.

The problem is that when the Constitution doesn't address an issue, the USSC has seemingly been known to pull a fast one and, taking advantage of epidemic constitutional ignorance, wrongly legislates special interest agendas from the bench in the name of the Constitution. Indeed, the USSC sometimes seemingly "finds" an issue in the Constitution via a séance, as opposed to honestly saying that the Constitution's silence about a given issue means that the 10th A. automatically makes the issue a state power issue.

Chisholm and Georgia (1793) might have been the first case where the states did catch on to the USSC's tendency to legislate from the bench when the Constitution doesn't clearly address an issue. The states smartly retaliated against the USSC's "unconstitutional" decision against the states in Chisholm v. Georgia by making the 11th Amendment.

As a side note, in a recent New York Supreme Court case concerning gay marriage, the Court decided to allow gay marriage simply because NY's constitution doesn't address gay marriage. But the NYSC has my respect because the judges essentially told the state's legislators to quite sitting on their hands and address gay marriage.

On the other hand, if I remember correctly, a Georgia judge recently gave permission for a lesiban couple to attend a high school prom. Although the high school had problems with that, regardless another Georgia judge had previously decided such a case in favor of gays, state legislators evidently just sat on their hands and did nothing. So Georgia legislators essentially gave the judges the license to legislate pro-gay agendas from the bench on a silver platter.

What a mess!

And the people, the ultimate seat of authority in the USA, are impotent to do anything about this judicial / legislative tangle because ignorance of how the government is supposed to work is epidemic.

http://tinyurl.com/hehr8

[Dumb_Ox]

For more influential nuts, see the Beyond Marriage initiative, perhaps inspired by too many midnight pot-fueled readings of Stranger in a Strange Land.

[SQUID]

Ironically, where I eventually see this going is that the Muslims will have to thank the homosexuals for redefining marriage to the extent that they can have their 14 wives and 42 children in America. Since man and woman is no longer the norm for marriage so too will one man and one woman no longer be the norm.