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Heather Clark
Christian News Network
December 16, 2013
A federal judge appointed by George W. Bush has struck down key parts of Utah’s polygamy ban as unconstitutional, while leaving intact the state prohibition against bigamy.
As previously reported, Kody Brown of the TLC reality show Sister Wives, along with his four “wives,” Meri, Janelle, Christine and Robyn, filed suit in 2011 to challenge parts of the law that they claimed violated their privacy rights.
The five had been under investigation by state officials for violating the statute, and moved to Nevada to escape punishment. Brown is married to Meri, and considers his relationship with the other three women as being “spiritual unions.”
While all states prohibit bigamy–entering into multiple marriages–Utah also bans residents from living together in a polygamous relationship. Brown, a member of the Apostolic United Brethren Church, a fundamentalist Mormon sect, contended that such a prohibition violates his freedom of religion.
Washington, D.C.-based attorney Jonathan Turley represented Brown in court, who has fathered 17 children with the four women.
“Homosexuals and polygamists do have a common interest: the right to be left alone as consenting adults,” he told reporters. “There is no spectrum of private consensual relations—there is just a right of privacy that protects all people so long as they do not harm others.”
On Friday, Judge Clark Waddoups, nominated by then-president George W. Bush sided with Brown in determining that Utah’s prohibition on polygamist cohabitation violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and interfered with the right to privacy. He pointed to the 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which decriminalized sodomy in the nation, and differentiated unmarried sexual conduct from criminal bigamy.
“Consensual sexual privacy is the touchstone of the rational basis review analysis in this case, as in Lawrence,” he wrote. “The court believes that Plaintiffs are correct in their argument that, in prohibiting cohabitation under the statute, ‘it is, of course, the state that has equated private sexual conduct with marriage.’”
