The Supreme Court’s striking down the Defense of Marriage Act opened Pandora’s box. With it, nothing is off the table, starting with the polygamy ban. Any twisted, perverted lifestyle choice has no grounds to be declared unconstitutional. The Overturning of DOMA will cause this country to literally destroy itself from within. The signs are everywhere. It’s already happening. What’s next? The answer to this is more terrifying than anyone could imagine. From now on, nothing is off-limits. When homosexual “marriage” was legitimized, in certain states, every other deviant lifestyle gained legitimacy. Once Pandora’s box was opened, there is no closing it. Now the target of wrath is traditional marriage.
Every fear about the Supreme Court overturning DOMA is coming true. This was the beginning of the “slippery slope” where nothing is sacred, and nothing can be ruled “unconstitutional” no matter how vile it is. When a country legitimizes homosexual relationships, every other lifestyle has a constitutional argument for legitimacy. It’s the beginning of a cultural nightmare. Decency and normality are gone.
Now, a judge has declared the laws arguing for a polygamy ban are unconstitutional. He cites the DOMA ruling has his reasoning for this. The homosexual “marriage” ruling has officially made it possible for the polygamy ban to be overturned.
In his 91-page opinion in Brown v. Buhman, on Dec. 13, U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups struck down Utah’s law making polygamy a crime. In so doing, he may have opened Pandora’s Box.
The Supreme Court’s ruling on DOMA already opened Pandora’s box. We are now just seeing the fruits of this reckless, lawless ruling. The worst is yet to come. Where this leads is uncharted territory. The true effects of such treachery are not yet known. Slowly, but surely, this ruling on same-sex relationships will erode society so much to where the only relationship that society will deem illegitimate is traditional marriage. This is the reality of opening Pandora’s box.
As a condition for becoming a state in 1896, Congress required Utah to outlaw polygamy, which is marriage between three or more persons. This case involved a family of fundamentalist offshoots of nineteenth-century Mormonism. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints disavowed polygamy in 1890, and again in 1904, but some splinter groups continue the practice.
Waddoups’ opinion would not only cover such groups, however, but also Muslims or anyone else who claims a right—religious or otherwise—to have multiple-person marriages. He notes that the Supreme Court ruled against polygamy in its 1878 case Reynolds v. U.S., but said he cannot simply rest upon that decision “without seriously addressing the much developed constitutional jurisprudence that now protects individuals from the criminal consequences intended by legislatures to apply to certain personal choices.”
There is no legal reason, after the Supreme Court ruled on DOMA, that polygamy should be outlawed. Homosexuality used to be criminalized. However, once they were given permission to “marry” every other group outlawed from living their “lifestyles” legally has no reason to be disavowed those rights. American culture will never recover from the DOMA ruling. This was a game changer. Polygamy was outlawed for a reason. Now, there is nothing to keeping it from being illegal. The polygamy ban will be history. This case is just the first of many that will lead to full rights for those in polygamous relationships
.In its 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case, the Supreme Court overruled previous sexuality precedents by declaring unconstitutional laws that made homosexual sodomy a crime, holding that although the Constitution says nothing about sex or marriage, there is nonetheless a right to consensual sexual activity between adults that government cannot regulate.
For over 5,000 years of recorded human history, marriage laws worldwide were about providing a social structure for producing and raising children. These laws simply acknowledged the biological reality that only sex between a man and a woman can produce a baby, and that, correspondingly, that every child born into the world has two parents, one of which is a man, the other a woman.
Marriage laws were designed to secure parental rights for that man and woman over the child they had created, and also imposed strict duties and obligations on each of them for raising that child. As part of that, those laws also bound the man and woman to each other, imposing obligations of sexually exclusivity, mutual care, and support.
Society has flipped on its head. Everything has changed. Now “marriage” is about personal fulfillment and not about traditional roles. One man, one woman, and their offspring make a nuclear family. To disregard this is to reap the consequences of cultural disorder. This is lawlessness. This goes against every law of God and man. These laws are not changeable, no matter what a court says. Disregarding 5,000 years of recorded history is wrong on every level. God will not be mocked. This is making a mockery of everything God has deemed right.
The new conception of marriage, rooted in the proliferation of no-fault divorce laws in the 1970s and the sexual revolution, is that marriage is about personal happiness and fulfillment. People should be free to form whatever relationships they find personally satisfying and to follow whatever their personal sexual inclinations are to engage in whatever form of sexual behavior they find gratifying.
This lawsuit is the brainchild of Prof. Jonathan Turley at George Washington University. He’s designed a two-step strategy, piggybacking on same-sex marriage: first, decriminalize polygamy, then assert a right to official recognition of polygamy.
Waddoups concluded that Reynolds has been overtaken by Lawrence and other recent legal developments. While keeping in place for now the Utah law against issuing multiple marriage certificates for polygamous marriage (the second step of the Turley strategy), he invalidated the criminal law against multiple adults cohabiting together as a family, which is the core of the laws against polygamy.
Man does not get to reinterpret scripture, to reinvent marriage. The Supreme Court decided to play God this summer, with a complete cultural blessing. This is wrong, and American society will reap the consequences of such recklessness.
