[Previous entry: "Proposing a new totalitarianism"] [Next entry: "Terrorists? Here? Working for us?"]

10/04/2004: "The Next Big Thing"

Better pay close attention to this argument–you're going to be hearing it a lot over the next few months:

Tom Green is an American polygamist. This month, he will appeal his conviction in Utah for that offense to the United States Supreme Court, in a case that could redefine the limits of marriage, privacy and religious freedom.

If the court agrees to take the case, it would be forced to confront a 126-year-old decision allowing states to criminalize polygamy that few would find credible today, even as they reject the practice. And it could be forced to address glaring contradictions created in recent decisions of constitutional law.

For polygamists, it is simply a matter of unequal treatment under the law.

Individuals have a recognized constitutional right to engage in any form of consensual sexual relationship with any number of partners. Thus, a person can live with multiple partners and even sire children from different partners so long as they do not marry. However, when that same person accepts a legal commitment for those partners "as a spouse," we jail them.

Likewise, someone such as singer Britney Spears can have multiple husbands so long as they are consecutive, not concurrent. Thus, Spears can marry and divorce men in quick succession and become the maven of tabloid covers. Yet if she marries two of the men for life, she will become the matron of a state prison.

Haven't we heard this before?

(Thanks to Mark Shea for this link, too.)