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Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Well, that didn't take long

When Supreme Court Justice Anthony led the liberal wing of the court into "finding" that the Constitution, via the 14th Amendment, guarantees a right to gay marriage despite the fact that the Constitution mentions neither marriage nor homosexuality -- why should there be a right to gay marriage when there is no right to marriage? -- Chief Justice John Roberts, in his dissenting opinion, expressed some pretty serious skepticism about both the decision and the unintended consequences. Justice Roberts postulated that Kennedy's opinion made it inevitable that polygamists likewise would force courts to "find" a Constitutional right to polygamist marriage:
Although the majority randomly inserts the adjective “two” in various places, it offers no reason at all why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage may be preserved while the man-woman element may not. Indeed, from the standpoint of history and tradition, a leap from opposite-sex marriage to same-sex marriage is much greater than one from a two-person union to plural unions, which have deep roots in some cultures around the world. If the majority is willing to take the big leap, it is hard to see how it can say no to the shorter one. It is striking how much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage.
Lefties have argued for years that it is insulting to gays to suggest that gay marriage can even be equated with polygamy by reasonable people -- meaning, of course, that anyone suggesting otherwise is simply not reasonable. Personally, after reading Kennedy's opinion, I put the over-under at seven days as to when polygamists would start the process to claim that fundamental right to marriage guaranteed by the Constitution. I took the under.

I won, with two days to spare:
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.
It took five days for polygamists to pursue that wonderful, special 14th-Amendment right to marry as they choose. These guys, ultimately, will win. Mrs. Wolves, when I brought this to her attention, said she had no problem with polygamy. My response was get ready for NAMBLA, animal lovers and God knows who else. They won't all win, but they'll all try.  And some of them will win. The article quoted above is about a polygamous family -- one man, multiple female wives -- but it references so-called polyamorous families, which apparently involved multiple males and multiple females. And let's not forget that polygamous families can include one woman and multiple men. Kennedy's opinion really provides no cogent argument against these arrangements (except maybe the animals and kids).

But even assuming the animal folks lose, at what point do we draw the line on kids, since states are no longer allowed to draw the line on the gender composition of the couple getting married? The age of consent varies from state to state -- with a federal Constitutional right to marry, folks wanting to marry children will, naturally, argue for the lowest available age. I don't know what that is, and I don't know that they won't try to play limbo with that age, anyway. How low can we go?

Get out the popcorn, people, this is going to get interesting. And the people celebrating gay marriage now are likely to wind up horrified by the Pandora's box they've opened. At least I hope they're horrified. On the other hand, since I believe their goal has nothing to do with gay marriage and actually is the destruction of societal norms and institutions so that they can write new ones more to their liking, then maybe they won't be horrified.

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