“We’re here. We’re polygamists. Get used to it”
“We just want to add legal legitimacy to an already happy, functional, strong loving family”
We have covered the slippery slope that leads to polygamist marriage many times, long before the recent Supreme Court ruling:
- “Polygamy would have to be permitted”
- The Gay Marriage Slippery Slope Is Back
- On what rational basis does NY State now deny polyamorous clusters the right to marry?
- Polyamory – at least be honest about it
- Utah polygamy ruling — You can’t just jump off the slippery slope
- Polygamy – another love that now dares speak its name again
Now there is a post-SCOTUS story about how Montana polygamist family applies for marriage license:
BILLINGS – Given the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling that same-sex marriage is legal in all 50 states, a Lockwood family is now looking to solidify rights of its own.
We first told you about the Colliers in January of 2015 when the polygamist family appeared on an episode of the TLC show, “Sister Wives.”
The polyamorous movement is a national push to allow marriage between multiple partners.
Nathan Collier and his two wives, Vicki and Christine, said Tuesday that they are simply looking for equality.Nathan is legally married to Vicki, but also wants to legally wed Christine.
On Tuesday, Nathan and Christine traveled to the Yellowstone County Courthouse to see if they would be awarded the right to marry under the Marriage Equality Act.
Polygamy is illegal under Montana state law, and recognized as a misdemeanor offense.
“We just want to add legal legitimacy to an already happy, strong, loving family,” said Nathan.
KRTV.com | Great Falls, Montana:
Some supporters of same-sex marriage take great offense to using the same legal logic for polyamorous families. Like this Salon writer (via NewsBusters), Salon Writer Can’t Handle Polygamist Who Wants Same Marriage Rights As Gay Community
It appears the writers over at Salon have an interesting definition of “marriage equality.” Gay marriage proponent and radical feminist Mary Elizabeth Williams showed her true colors on the issue today by claiming “fringe groups”, like those who practice polygamy, should not have access to new freedoms detailed in the recent SCOTUS case which granted gay couples marriage recognition nationwide. …
Well, conservatives, here it is, just as you predicted. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria… And on cue, here comes Nathan Collier — a man who describes himself on Facebook as “an American, conservative, Constitutionalist, capitalist, (formerly) Christian, heterosexual middle aged white male of Southern heritage” — and his lovely two brides Victoria and Christine, asking for official recognition of their union. Coming soon: Cat ladies applying for marriage licenses! …
If you want to argue that polygamy and marriage equality are the same thing, well, they’re not. If you want respect for how consenting adults arrange their households, though, you’ve got it. That does not however mean that because one group that has fought for friggin’ decades for basic recognition and respect finally has achieved something, that every fringe group — and yeah, sister wife families, you are fringe — gets a piece of the action too.
Why all the hostility? Giving polyamorous clusters the right to marry doesn’t demean your marriage, does it? You don’t have to get divorced just because a threesome wants equality.
Don’t take my word for it. Recall the audio I’ve posted before of one of the leading intellectual founders of the same sex marriage movement, Professor Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago, who argued in 2009 that polygamy must be allowed for the same reasons as same-sex marriage, as we detailed in “Polygamy would have to be permitted”.
She went further, and would allow some incestuous relationships to be blessed by the state, but that’s a whole other thing. From a prior post:
In the audio below, Nussbaum is questioned by a student whether he should be permitted to marry his parents, since there were valid estate and other tax reasons to do so.
Nussbaum then addressed several aspects of the slippery slope. She rejected bestiality out of hand as lacking necessary consent.
Nussbaum stated, as to polygamy, there really was no justifiable state interest in banning the practice, particularly if past unequal gender roles were addressed by more modern polyamorous considerations: “”Polygamy would have to be permitted.”
More inflamatory was her position on incest between siblings. While willing to draw a bright line on parent-child incest because of the compelling state interest in fighting child abuse, Nussbaum nonetheless applied the deconstructive analysis to sibling incest and found the state interest to be marginal:
“But then when you get to brothers and sisters, well, you know, now we know so much about the genes, and we certain don’t forbid people with Tay-Sachs [garbled] to get married. So I feel that it’s just bad faith to forbid the brother and sister on these putative health grounds. If one at one time states did think they had that interest, they don’t have that anymore.”
Don’t yell at me. I didn’t say it.
I can hear the chants now:
“We’re here. We’re polygamists. Get used to it”
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Comments
Now that marriage has been redefined, polygamy can be any of numerous combinations of men and women.
Since the left is just fine with two lesbians or two gays getting married, whats wrong if you have three Lesbians or three gays that decide they love each other. Shouldn’t they also be given the same rights as the two gays or Lesbians? How long will it be till little sally has three mommies or three daddies?
I’ve been asking this question over and over!
To all those “hip,” “cool” churches who think they’re showing the Lord’s love and understanding by performing homosexual marriages, are you going to marry 5 gay men together?
They probably will, given enough incrementalism, and they’ll never notice how far their church has collapsed.
If Marriage is just a contract between two people – it could be a contract between 3 or 4 people. But – there is no history of law to govern it.
If 3 women marry one man and she divorces him – does she get 1/2 of his assets or in a community property state – does he get 1/2 of his asses and 1/2 of the other women’s haves as well? If a woman has a baby and then divorces – who gets visitation?
Clearly polygamy is more than just multiple implementation of the same old marriage contract.
Count the coupling lines. Families have visitation rights.
Yes there is. There are far more cultures in history that have had polygamous relationships than have had gay marriage. Take a look at many of the middle eastern countries and their legal history.
There have been a few polyamorous ones as well, though the only one that I’m aware of is based on the flawed premise that the children inherit traits from all their fathers.
I have some polygamists in my family. They are flat-out insane. Their household is a constant uproar of brutal arguments.
Every TV spot on polygamy I’ve ever seen is a happy little puff piece. The idiot presenter will always ask soft-ball questions and then give us a “Gee, I didn’t know that” for every answer.
These polygamists usually pretend to be Christians (they are almost always white supremacists) but it’s laughable, as the New Testament shuts polygamy down quite bluntly.
Polygamy is poison to every civilization. It needs to be prosecuted, not just ignored, and CERTAINLY not legalized.
There are homes of hetero married couples that are no different. So what’s you point? Something should be denied to everyone because some can’t handle it? Remember that the next time some nut-job shoots up a church, school, or mall, and the Left comes for your guns.
There are homes of hetero married couples that are no different.
How did “hetero” get involved here? What the hell are you talking about?
I’ll assume you meant “monogamous” and move on.
Every argument in a polygamist household is directly related to the polygamy.
The husband constantly plays one wife off another for a power play. It’s abuse. It’s patently unhealthy.
When a woman stands at a wedding ceremony watching her husband marry another woman, she is under mind control and abuse.
Are you really that dense? Obviously gay marriage is permitted now in many States (if not across the nation). I was making sure the distinction was clear, that was talking about “traditional” marriages and none other.
What I said was “hetero couples.” Do you have as much trouble with English as SCOTUS? That means “two straight people, a man and a woman,” with far less verbiage.
Have you examined all polygamous couples to come to these conclusions? None of them are happy or stable? Is that your business? And if it’s not, why and how does it become the state’s?
RKae, thank you for posting your actual experience.
Yea … let’s go ahead and legalize it. Why not? SCOTUS has redefined marriage after 5,000 years. Anything goes now … (3) lezzies, (4) straights, (5) homos, any combo thereof. Our Nobel winning black messiah approves, as does the wise Latina. And to appease the Muzzies, I’m OK with man-goat arrangements as well. Even man-multiple goats.
If “tradition,” long practice (at least 5,000 years), and Biblical approval is what you want, polygamy has all that (can I say this without being a racist?) in spades. If it’s not considered proper or correct now, it’s because modern Christianity redefined it in the teeth of biblical precedent.
Abraham, Solomon, David, and Moses, among others, were all polygamists. Condemn polygamy, and you judge all these men:
http://www.biblicalpolygamy.com/polygamists/
Wikipedia has an excellent article on the practice as it relates to Christianity and the Bible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygamy_in_Christianity
You will see that New Testament support for monogamy is based on passages that are not without multiple interpretations. You might say that polygamists interpret those passages to support their positions, and they may say the same about the way their opponents interpret those passages.
There wasn’t welfare then, silly man…the men engaging in this practice didn’t expect the government to fund their families.
There is no good reason for a government to redefine marriage to include homosexuality, polygamy, pedophilia and bestiality – doing so would only increase the likelihood of economic, social and moral collapse.
You are defending the indefensible.
There is a point to be gleaned from the comment on biblical history.
The gay-marriage lobby has insisted that a same-sex “marriage” is essentially no different from a heterosexual one because “love is love,” and that only bigotry was shutting them out of an institution they should naturally have access to, with full social approval and government support. When the polygamy issue comes up, most of those same people have argued that it’s a completely different matter and that the comparison is ridiculous; that marriage is naturally and rightly between two consenting adults, whereas anything involving more than two is a different kind of social arrangement, and not just “love is love.”
More briefly, in that argument, polygamy shatters the natural and salubrious concept of marriage, whereas the same-sex variety merely permits “equality” in who gets to participate.
But in terms of history, polygamy has a better claim to being considered simply a variation on the “marriage” theme, whereas a same-sex pairing was never before regarded as a marriage at all.
Hmmmm! Soon I’ll be able to marry my boat and claim it as a dependent.
When your boat is able to provide a birth certificate and give consent, I’ll be your best man.
Will it’s arrest record count?
Why you gotta be so rude? I’m gonna marry them anyway.
The “equal” ruling grants the same rights to every relationship, loving, not so loving, and platonic. The “equal” proponents are scrambling to rationalize denying equal rights to others.
Then, there are the age limits…..
What age limits? The Left support indiscriminate killing (i.e. selective-child) as a right at any age. It surely follows that the Left also support the right to marriage at any age. Perhaps they should reconsider what they normalize or promote on principle. Pro-choice is a degenerate doctrine that creates moral hazards and destabilizes the environment.
Getting rid of the age limits has always been a sub-goal of some in the SSM movement. That being said:
A.) There’s ways to break the age limits already. You just have to know how to navigate the system properly (I’ve advised clients on how to do it in Texas, with and without parental consent). One of these days, I’ll have a client actually want to pay to go through with it.
B.) Now that marriage is basically going to be treated as a ‘contract’ right, all sorts of shenanigans are going to arise: You will have underage individuals entering into “contract” marriages which will then be voidable by the underage party upon turning 18 (not void ab initio but merely voidable at the party’s whim). That choice of contract will be chipped away at again and again until the age limit disappears.
If what you say under “A” is true, either what you’ve done the law already permits (although apparently grudgingly, if it requires and attorney to cause the State to make the admission), or you’ve somehow received permission from the State for your clients to do something that the law actually doesn’t permit. There are no other possibilities. The State either does, or doesn’t break the law for your clients.
See Texas Family Code Section 2.003 – Application for license by minor;
Section 2.102 – Parental Consent for Underage Applicant (age 16 to 18); and
Section 2.103 – Court Order for Underage Applicant (no age limit). Here the operative language is “the Court, sitting without a jury, believes marriage to be in the best interest of the minor, the court, by order, shall grant the minor permission to marry.”). In practice, the Court has to date required the parties to be 14, but nowhere in black-letter law is that actually required.
As I said, if you know how to navigate the system, the age limits can be broken.
Okay, let’s just “recognize” everyone’s personal declaration of who they are married to, as long as all participants can give voluntary adult consent.
Then let’s do an item by item overhaul of the taxpayer funded benefits that actually are driving the alternate marriage nonsense, and start allocating them based, not solely on “marriage”, but on other rationales. E.g. there is no “marriage equality” in state spousal support laws on divorce; there is no “marriage equality” for joint tax return filers versus married filing separately, or in estate taxes involving foreign spouses; there is no “marriage equality” as far as which divorced spouses can claim the ex-spouse’s social security (it depends on length of marriage); there is no “marriage equality” vis a vis stepparent-children relationships. Etc.
Long before gay marriage was even thought about, I wondered how the state could lawfully prevent polygamy. The federal government only allowed Utah entry into the Union under the condition that it abolish the practice. Meaning that Utah, alone of all the States, was allowed entry into the Union conditionally, as no State had been admitted before nor since. What about democracy? Why wasn’t their democratic support for the institution respected by Congress? Why wasn’t the State’s authority to define marriage (that I read about so much here) acknowledged? What about the right of the people to practice their religious beliefs? Mormons are Christians (whether or not other Christians care to admit it – failure to admit that Mormons are Christians is little different from Sunnis refusing to acknowledge that Shiites are Muslims), was this the start of the “war on Christianity”? Anyone here who thinks States should determine for themselves how they define marriage must support Utah’s right to polygamy, which they surrendered under duress.
Polygamy is the original “slippery slope.” Gays just beat the Mormons to the top of the slide.
Most of your argument is from a State’s vantage point, and Utah was not a state until after they agreed to abolish polygamy. They had no States rights. They were a territory.
So I have to accept that someone’s a Christian because they say they are?
If I’m not allowed to disown Mormons, then I guess I can’t disown David Koresh or Jim Jones, either.
Mormons disavow what is in the New Testament (“each woman shall have her own husband”) and use an entirely different book.
Not Christian.
If you’re not Roman Catholic, and esp. if you’re of a protestant religion that had its roots in Roman Catholicism, then you’re not a Christian either, because you’ve deviated from the True Church (or at least, that’s how the RC church labels itself – don’t argue with me about it, write a letter to the Pope). A Christian from the 5th Century would consider all modern Christians heretics, worthy of being burned alive. Christianity is not a monolithic block, it shattered into a million pieces long ago and is continuing to do so. So who gets to decide what their religion is and is not? The believers themselves, that’s who. Nobody else is qualified, because if we were to admit that someone else is, endless arguments would ensue as to who that might be.
Assuming that you consider yourself a Christian, I have every authority to say you’re not a Christian as you have to say the same about anyone else. That is – NONE. If you believe in the Christian god, then there’s only one judge of anyone’s “Christianity,” and you aren’t him.
Good lord, I even drew the analogy of the spat between the two major branches of Islam, which we as outsiders look at as so much nonsense, and you still don’t get it. You are unable to reflect upon your own beliefs as you reflect upon those of others. Or do you think the schism between Sunni and Shia perfectly reasonable?
Polygamy will be enshrined in the law the first time a muslim takes the issue to court…religion of peace, and all that.
That’s right. If the Salon author had been discussing a muzzie “family”, Salon would certainly take the multiple marriage “partner” position as being covered by the recent SCOTUS decision. But since it is a white male professing to be a Christian, horrors! It’s a no-go.
Bingo! 9th hit the nail square on the head.
Polygamy has been tried in numerous cultures over the ages. How many of them survived? There are good reasons for that.
Notice that the societies in which it persists today were generally primitive and backward until technology supplied by Western Civ gave them access to the valuable resources under the lands upon which they happened to be roaming. And except for that wealth, remain in many ways primitive today.
– –
But the “slope” slips far beyond marriage. The target is Western Civilization, which has alone brought to mankind most of its advances in longevity, agriculture, science, and trade. Only by destroying all the foundations of WC can the Utopian socialists hope to build their Brave New World – starring most of us as Happy Proletarians and them as Enlightened Commissars.
At least, they all see themselves as Commissars, but there won’t be quite so many privileged slots open once all the true engines of prosperity have been destroyed. So most will be disappointed. And probably shot. Too bad.
It doesn’t work because the surplus of unmarried men are angry and frustrated.
The only thing that could keep polygamy going was constant war.
“The only thing that could keep polygamy going was constant war.”
Something Islam is good at providing.
Jews were polygamists and their successors (post Titus in Jerusalem), Talmudists, ceased polygamy when? Talmudists were co-rulers — the ones who did the work of trade, accounting and administration — with Moslems in the Moslem MENA hegemonies and if they could afford it, were polygamists alongside Moslems. When did that stop?
Jewish and Talmudist law and legal methodology is a major part of Sharia. Roman and Christian law and Arab tribal habits also embed in Sharia. See Hagarism, from Princeton.
You can bet polygamy will be found a “constitutional right” by SCOTUS. Polyandry as well.
Queers bit off more loaf than they can digest. But they’ll be happy when pederasty also is deemed a “constitutional right.” That and employer and government financial benefits have been their goal all along. Still, they may-rie barfing a lot at the unintended consequences. Then the walls move in and they exclaim, “This is exactly how they make goose live pate!”
Common sense, evidence in statistics and science (as well as Scripture) condemn and do not support your little pet idea that polygamy is AOK.
Neither do those resources support homo/bi/pansexuality, pedophilia, incest and FGM, nor other Islamic sexual practices.
I had a very, very interesting conversation at the Courthouse with a group of my colleague attorneys which practice in child protective services law and divorce law this past week.
The short version is that: with the SCOTUS decision, a WHOLE bunch of same sex couples that have been holding themselves out as “married” to the public immediately became “common law married” in Texas.
This WILL have policy implications. As if any of those individuals ever do want to separate, the other party now may well have a claim to division of the marital estate created during the period of common law marriage, and divorce proceedings may well have to be implemented.
There is a whole new field of law which is going to open up based on the SSM ruling, and a lot of it is going to be very, very uncomfortable for most of the SSM crowd that has not thought through the consequences of what they have asked for.
Yeah, it is a bonanza for divorce lawyers. From what I have seen, the break up rate among same sex couples is close to 100%.
Chuck you are so right!
I remember some comic a long time ago mentioned SSM in a stand up bit. He said, SSM may be good, however just wait till they get to Same Sex Divorce.
I have been a professional credit counselor. I have had “gay” clients come in for Bankruptcy Counseling. They wanted to take Bankruptcy to cause credit problems for their former partner. They could do this because they had joint ownership of mortgaged property.
This will become a whole new field of law.
SSM will also open up the transfer of survivors benefits from Social Security. For instance if your are eligible for them and male, you can marry a friend such as a retired teacher who is not eligible and be able to transfer a secondary income to him upon your demise.
I had never thought about it……….a threesome every night!
Not a lawyer but heard Ted Olson argue against prop 8. Sotomayor asked him why his arguement wouldn’t apply to polygamy. He said it wouldn’t because that’s behavior. Unlike homosexuals who are born that way, not a choice. So, don’t know how that plays against Kennedy’s decision. Especially the sappy dignity drivel.
In answer to Olson’s argument, I would note that some people are born bisexual, so wouldn’t it be unfair to deny them their own form of marriage?
Also, it’s widely noted that men are not born monogamous, and for most of them it takes discipline to become and remain so. (The same may be true of some women, but to a smaller degree.) In this respect, polygamy follows from the “born that way” argument more naturally than monogamy.
Obviously, marriage is not just a matter of doing what comes naturally. It’s an institution that arises from natural facts — as demonstrated by its universality — but its purpose is to control and discipline nature (and protect its vulnerable fruits).
Culturally and logically, the mere fact that some people are born with homosexual proclivities (or acquire them so early in life that it’s practically the same thing) is a weak argument for redefining marriage to include same-sex relationships.
Our feckless leaders and judges haven’t counted the cost of their foolishness in trying to redefine marriage.
Dr. George at Hillsdale does just that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeGbO7xUaSM
America is suffering from too much tolerance. We need to bring back witch trials.