Click Here For Marriage: Polygamy a factor in marriage debates

ReligionLink March 29, 2004: Marriage: Polygamy a factor in marriage debates: "Polygamy has emerged as an issue in the ferocious marriage debates. Could sanctioning gay marriage lead to legalizing polygamy? It depends on whom you ask. Though polygamy is illegal in all 50 states, it's thought to be practiced as matter of religion by thousands of people in the United States - particularly in the West - and is rarely prosecuted. Polygamy is back in the public consciousness for the first time in years because of wrangling over the legal definition of marriage and several high-profile criminal cases.
So far, there has been no serious challenge to anti-polygamy laws, but, as scholar Sarah Barringer Gordon puts it, culturally there is a significant disturbance in the waters. For one thing, marriage is no longer the main way people organize their lives. Living together without marriage - now extremely common - once used to be illegal, too. For another, the legal arguments from the late nineteenth-century court cases that denied a free exercise right to preach and practice polygamy have been rendered obsolete by the Supreme Court's subsequent First Amendment case law, according to John Witte, director of Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Religion at Emory University. The court would have to rely on other arguments to reach the same result."