Supreme Court declines polygamy case
The husband of three wives claimed the court's landmark ruling on gays applies to polygamists.
By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorposted February 27, 2007
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The US Supreme Court Monday declined to consider the appeal by a Utah man with three wives who sought to overturn his bigamy conviction by citing the high court's 2003 landmark ruling on gay rights.
The action lets stand a Utah Supreme Court decision upholding the state's bigamy law even though it clashes with some residents' sincerely held religious beliefs.
"There are literally thousands of religious people in Utah ... who now have to be concerned to look over their shoulder that some day [state Attorney General] Mark Shurtleff and the state of Utah will come after them," says Raymond Berry, one of the lawyers representing polygamist Rodney Holm. The ruling will raise concerns among religious fundamentalists in Utah that the state will step up its pressure against them, he adds. "They are kind of like turtles, they pull their heads in, they stay out of the public eye."
The Holm case offers a glimpse into a world rarely seen by most Americans. There are an estimated 37,000 religious polygamists in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, South Dakota, and Utah.
Mr. Holm's lawyers hoped to use the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling on gay rights as a means to challenge state laws against multiple marriage.
In that landmark case, called Lawrence v. Texas, the court invalidated Texas' sodomy law, ruling that gay adult Texans, like all other adults, were entitled to intimate relations without government interference. In a fiery dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia warned that the court's rejection of moral disapproval as a foundation for certain laws would open the door to legal challenges to state statutes banning same-sex marriage, prostitution, and bigamy, among others.
A key legal question is how broadly Lawrence v. Texas should be read. Most judges have interpreted that case narrowly. But within five months of the Lawrence decision, the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts announced a constitutional right in that state to gay marriage.
Lawyers for Holm were hopeful that a majority of justices would see his case as an opportunity to extend the holding in Lawrence v. Texas to protect polygamist relationships from state prosecution in cases where all the parties were aware of and approved of the practice.
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