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No Ups for the “Big Love”
This one is for those of you who have some understanding of the law and who watch HBO’s sometimes stellar, sometimes bland polygamy drama, “Big Love,” wondering about the intricacies of polygamy law out in the multiple-wife capitol of our nation, Salt Lake City, Utah. Well, Utah’s highest court handed down a contentious, 85-page decision that doesn’t particularly clear the confusion. The case itself involved Rodney Holm, a 32 year-old-police officer who entered into a “spiritual” marriage with 16-year-old Ruth Stubbs. The problem was, at the time of this “spiritual” marriage, Holm was already legally married to Ruth’s sister and had a second “spiritual” wife on the side. He was eventually convicted of bigamy and other sex offenses, and the Utah Supreme Court upheld that conviction.
The court’s majority reasoned that Holm’s spiritual relationship with the 16-year-old was exactly the kind of thing criminalized by Utah’s polygamy statutes. However, the court’s Chief Justice dissented with this reasoning, arguing at great length (37 pages!) that Utah’s interest against polygamy only addresses multiple legal marriages, and should not be extended to religious unions where there is no claim of legal status.
The majority decision, upholding Holm’s conviction, certainly squares with our nation’s conventions of morality, although at the same time it manages to apparently avoid any real grounding in the law. The problem is that if the court wanted to criminalize spiritual cohabitation, it seems that 1) it’s getting into dicey matters of state/religion conflict, and 2) it would then be able to legally ascribe morally favorable cohabitation agreements. In other words, if the state can forbid one man from schtupping two other women outside of the context of a “legal” marriage, it ought to be able to criminalize adultery, prohibit unmarried couples from living together, or even criminalize same-sex partners who hold themselves out to be “spiritually” married. In essence, the state law criminalizes the behavior of consenting adults who chose to live in an intimate relationship differing from the norms of the majority, without seeking or taking any additional legal benefits - which seems fine in the context of polygamy, but runs into all sorts of slippery-slope problems in other contexts.
Moreover, Holm was a member of a Fundamentalist offshoot of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a sect which embraces polygamy and encourages religious unions with other women as a way to reach the highest level of heaven. Agree or disagree with the decision, the court is essentially prohibiting this poor man from reaching nirvana. And it seems to me that, if a man has to put up with three wives nagging him to go shopping on football Sunday, he deserves a little peace in the afterlife.
Comments
Read any news post (CNN for example) of this story, or any other story about polygamy in the U.S., and you would read that the LDS church excomunicates members found to be practicing polygamy. More careful reporters get it right. This church abandoned polygamy in 1890. In your story you relate the officer prosecuted for polygamy was LDS and that the church condones the practice. The LDS church does not.
Author's Note: My apologies; it was a fundamentalist offshoot of the LDS. Noted and corrected.
Posted by A | May 17, 2006 11:41 AM
Salt Lake is not the capital of plural marriage. Most of the polygamy that is practiced by the off-shoot sects takes place in Arizona and Nevada. I've lived in Utah for 33 years and I've never encountered one polygamist. They live just across the southern Utah border in Arizona so that Arizona has jurisdiction over them but no incentive to travel hours into the desert to arrest them. And Utah can't.
You'll have a hard time finding an issue that is more thoroughly misunderstood by outside people than polygamy. We get really sick of pointing out that the LDS Church outlawed the practice 116 years ago. It has no currency in the church or the state anymore. But it's all anyone knows about Utah.
Posted by jim Xavier | May 17, 2006 6:52 PM
None of the wives are going to be shopping on football Sunday, or any other Sunday for that matter. If they're willing share their husband with other women so they can get to heaven, they're certainly not going to screw it up by shopping on the Sabbath. Silly silly...
Posted by lola | May 21, 2006 8:40 PM