Polygamy ruling

[fortinbras]

For those of you who think that monagamy is too monotonous, the Fundamentalist Mormon family from the cable show "Sister Wives" managed to get the federal district court in Utah to hold that part of Utah's strict anti-polygamy law was unconstitutional.

The decision is very long (about 62 pages) ...
https://ecf.utd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/sh ... 1cv0652-78

Actually, this doesn't make polygamy legal, it simply decriminalizes an element in the Utah law that was more severe than any other state's anti-polygamy law. Other states made it a crime to obtain multiple marriage licenses and go through multiple registered weddings; the Utah law made it a crime to merely claim, without the formality of a license or a registered wedding, to be married to someone other than Wife #1.

Anyway, knowing this, some of you may make new plans for the weekend.

[LaVidaRoja]

Some day, the Supreme Court will have to rule on the Constitutionality of a law that conflicts with the religious belief that more than two people may legally enter into a marriage.

[fortinbras]

Actually the US Supreme Court already did, about 140 years ago, in the Reynolds case:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case? ... 5155375579

Where it upheld anti-polygamy laws.

The inevitable problem with polygamy - and it already has been demonstrated for more than a century among the polygamous Mormon communities - is that, boy babies and girl babies being born in nearly equal numbers throughout the human race, allowing some men to accumulate multiple wives means there are no women left for a significant number of men who are therefor unable to have even one wife. This leads to a lot of unpleasantness and even war and violence. Several polygamous cults in the US, not just Fundie Mormons, have instances of the cult leadership abruptly exiling boys, and even married men - but their wives stay behind for "re-assignment", with lots of illwill as a result. In the southwest, the teenage boys suddenly pushed out of the cults drift to the cities where they frequently become social burdens.

[LaVidaRoja]

Remember, Plessy v.. Ferguson was about 115 years ago. The first justice Harlan dissented: "[The] fundamental objection, therefore, to the statute is that it interferes with the personal freedom of citizens"