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Utah bigamist Tom Green was sentenced to five years in prison for having five wives. He faced up to 25 years.  We have no love for Tom Green, but this court decision has implications that do concern us.

All of the wives knew about each other and were living in a communal setting in seperate trailers, so there was no fraud on his part. In fact, legally, he was only married to one of them at a time, even though he treated them all as wives simultaneously. They continue to be quite devoted to him. The legal argument the prosecutor made and that was accepted by the jury was that "a solemnized marriage otherwise valid is not rendered invalid by failure to meet licensing requirements." Utah law seems to support this interpretation.    

If Tom Green committed welfare fraud and was producing an abundance of children he was unable to support, 30 in all from 10 different women, then he should pay a penalty (although I don’t know that jail time makes a lot of sense- especially with conjugal visits). Having more children than you can provide for should be illegal under any circumstances, even if you have one wife with multiple children that you force onto welfare, or if you are a single guy running around impregnating a bunch of women you can’t afford to support, or if you are a single woman with multiple children collecting welfare. It is irresponsible behaviour, is harmful to the children, and the state should step in. Tom Green was found guilty of only one count of criminal non-support for owing back child support payments, though.

Two of Tom Green’s wives were only 13 and 14 at the time he married them, and most were teenagers. No one that young can consent to marriage, period. But he was not found guilty of that. One of the major problems with the Mormon brand of Polygamy is that the marriages do not always involve the consent of the wives. They are arranged. That should be illegal, but it is not.

The arguments against bigamy and polygamy do make sense, but they are arguments that would make sense under any living arrangements. Forced or coerced sex with underage girls, child abuse, and substandard living conditions for the children should, and are in many cases, already illegal. 

On the surprising and more encouraging side is this quote from the Salt Lake Tribune: "Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said he has no desire to go after consenting adults engaged in polygamous relationships. Instead, he and other prosecutors say they are more willing to prosecute other crimes that occur in secret societies. 'We want to be more aggressive about fighting crimes against children,' Shurtleff said. He advocates dropping the penalty for bigamy involving adults from a third-degree felony to a class A misdemeanor to encourage people to come forward with information about serious crimes. The exception would be people who are in bigamous relationships with minors, said Shurtleff, who plans to meet with county prosecutors to develop a strategy for fighting abuses within polygamous societies."

Oddly, we find ourselves agreeing with a Utah prosecutor, although we would go a little further and remove bigamy from the law books, unless it is perpetrated as a fraud or upon a minor. If these polygamist relationships did not have to be so far underground, we might better be able to keep an eye on the child abuse and other problems that can occur. 

Many prosecutors are not be as progressive as Shurtleff, though. I appeared on the Jenny Jones show where the topic concerned a case where the children were taken away from a married women in a polyamorous relationship with a second man and given into the custody of the children's alcoholic Grandmother. The case was resolved when the mother was forced to never again see the other man she was in love with and take parenting classes (even though there was absolutely no evidence presented that she was in any way a bad mother). If you applied the Utah legal standard for marriage, she could have been charged with bigamy and sent to jail as well.

And then you have the many people living together in sin. According to the U.S. census, the number of people cohabiting has increased 72% since 1990, with over 5.5 million unmarried partner households today. Unfortunately, seven states still classify cohabitation as illegal.  Virginia, which has used the ironic slogan, “Virginia is for lovers”, has some of the most repressive sex laws in the U.S., and authorities there have threatened not to renew the day-care license of a woman solely because she has lived with her partner for 17 years. A U.S. Magistrate in Charlotte, North Carolina asks all defendants appearing before him if they are living together outside of marriage, and refuses to release them if they are unless they agree to get married, move, or kick their partners out of the house. In these seven states, charges are often filed by disgruntled ex-spouses and in child custody cases if their former partner is living with someone.

As we have often said, laws dictating the sexual lives of consenting adults are used primarily for mischief. They are unconscionable in a free society.  Who you live with, who you have sex with, and what type of sex you have with other consenting adults should not, in any way, shape or form, be the government’s business. 
 

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