Tag Archives: Brown v. Buhman

Some people will just never be happy.

singleI wouldn’t have thought that the dissembling by the anti-marriage crowd could get worse when they had to admit that Utah’s polygamy law wasn’t really overturned after all, but it just did.

The following arrived from Citizen Link:

It’s what many marriage supporters have been trying to point out for months: The redefinition of the institution could pave the path to legalized polygamy.

North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem filed a legal opinion Thursday basically saying that a man who married another man in another state, may obtain a marriage license — with a woman — in North Dakota. That’s because same-sex marriage is not recognized in North Dakota.

Quite true, that last part. North Dakota was one of the states to pass a constitutional amendment back in 2004 restricting civil marriage to “man-woman couples” (we may wish to return to a discussion of how that happened).

Also, AG Stenehjem was responding to a hypothetical question. There is no actual man in a North Dakota case, a detail omitted by Citizen Link.

But it’s this framing, quoting a Breitbart columnist, that really impressed me with its capacity for expressing the exact opposite of reality by stating bald, incontrovertible facts. This is a work of art.

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Another day, another painfully dumb lie

polygamyBecause what else can they do, really?

ACTIVIST JUDGE LEGALIZES POLYGAMY, JUST AS WE WARNED, screams the latest email from certified hate group “American Family Association” (mainly known at this time of year for their lucrative “war on Christmas” scam, in which they solicit donations by pretending the world will end if store clerks say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”).

Not so fast, cupcake. U.S. District Court Judge Clark Waddoups ruled on Friday that a family, “reality TV stars Kody Brown and his four ‘wives’,” can’t be prosecuted under Utah’s anti-polygamy law. But what does this actually mean?

The AFA’s hysterical email notwithstanding, here is what it clearly does not mean: the “redefinition of marriage” in Utah.

Judge Waddoups explicitly ruled that the prohibition of bigamy – “the fraudulent or otherwise impermissible possession of two purportedly valid marriage licenses for the purpose of entering into more than one purportedly legal marriage” – is not overturned.

Furthermore, the plaintiffs were not even seeking legal recognition for plural marriage. I am tempted to wonder here whether the bright legal minds over at AFA even bothered to read the opinion…oh, never mind. Of course they read the opinion.

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