Comments on: A kaleidoscopic report on the Princeton conference

By: Mormon Mentality - Thoughts and Asides by Peculiar People » Mormons in the Pew Report

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 23:43:38 +0000

[...] long time ago, I wrote a post discussing, in part, the Pew Forum’s John Green, whose presentation at the Princeton symposium [...]

By: Mormon Mentality - Thoughts and Asides by Peculiar People » Quick Thoughts on Romney and “The Speech”

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 04:44:40 +0000

[...] dull establishment Joseph Smith spurned, that establishment is not ready to have him. Will he, as Francis Beckwith claimed Kennedy did, have to surrender the distinctiveness of his faith as the price of admission? [...]

By: Times & Seasons » Random Thoughts on the Princeton Conference

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 21:57:46 +0000

[...] Reports on the conference are already making the rounds (see Matt B.’s excellent summary here, for example); those seriously obsessed with Mormon studies will be happy to here that the entire [...]

By: DKL

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:33:42 +0000

dbc: Marriage is a fundamental right and therefore the equal protection clause is implicated You're conflating two things here: First are the legal rights associated with marriage. Second is the notion of marriage itself. These are logically separate. In Vermont, for example, one can enter into a same-sex union (affording all the legal rights associated with marriage) that is not a marriage. And it's possible to imagine a setup in which people can legally participate in a polygamous marriage, but enjoy none of the legal protections afforded to a married couple. (In fact, such a setup is downright probable.) Decriminalization effects the second of these. Legalization effects the first of these. No matter what a court decides, the creation of a system of legal rights associated with polygamous couples simply cannot be created overnight. There's no parrallel at all to desegregation, because that did not entail a fundamentally new legal framework -- simply the abolition of an old framework and an expansion of an existing one. Furthermore, cultural disruption has nothing at all to do with most judges decisions. In fact, I suspect that most judges are stupid enough to value whatever disruption they cause within a system they personally consider to be unjust. But lets be perfectly clear: If a judge decides that polygamy is OK and that we can't throw people in jail for marrying multiple spouses, that merely decriminalizes it. If a judge decides that polygamous couples are entitled to the same protections afforded to binary unions, the she's made a category mistake. To choose a simple example: If a spouse in a binary union dies, the other has certain unique rights of survivorship relative to her property. This is true by the process of elimination. The only parallel case for a polygamous couple will be all the spouses die but one. Cases in which there are multiple marriage survivors of a spouse are categorically different. If a judge creates a common-law type of precedent from the bench, this is a step toward legalization, but it still is not legalization until there is a framework in place for handling legal disputes. What is going to happen is this: Polygamy will eventually cease to be illegal, but it will be a very long time before anything resembling a proper legal framework is developed around it.

By: Matt B

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:51:54 +0000

Annegb - Unfortunately, Barlow was not able to make it, so Jan Shipps took his paper, reworked it, and presented it herself. I missed virtually all of the paper; what I heard emphasized the role of social issues that mobilized not just Mormons, but Catholics, and later evangelicals in the late 1970s.

By: a random John

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 19:12:10 +0000

I'm entertained by the notion that legal arguments will be what wins the day here. If the judges find something sufficiently acceptable they'll find the legal arguments they need and declare them sufficient. Witness Roe v. Wade or the MA gay marriage decision. If a sufficient number of judges decide that polygamy is ok then that is what will happen.

By: Juvenile Instructor » An Insider’s View of the Princeton Conference

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 18:39:49 +0000

[...] on Joseph Smith’s political thought. He was kind enough to provide a writeup of the recent Princeton Conference for the Juvenile [...]

By: dpc

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 18:19:54 +0000

DKL: Without doing a detailed legal analysis of polygamy and its implications with regard to equal protection and due process contained under the Fourteenth amendment, I think that legally and philosophically, it becomes harder to defend a two-person definition of marriage if marriage becomes a purely social construct that is not rooted in our traditional Western paradigm of family. Marriage is a fundamental right and therefore the equal protection clause is implicated. To the extent that a polygamist's fundamental right to marry is disproportionately burdened by an arbitrary two-person marriage legal standard, the equal protection clause applies. The fact that there needs to be a legislative and litigative framework to be developed would not stop any court from pursuing a given course of action. Desegregation in the South required disruption of aspects of a regional culture and its practices and I don't think that most federal courts worried about that very much. Antitrust law in the US was not hindered in its development of a framework despite the relative paucity of formal legislation concerning it.

By: DKL

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:25:53 +0000

dpc: It’s not a long jump from decriminalization to legalization. Actually, it is a very far jump. Decriminalization can mean that it's legal. Legalization means that we actually embrace it within our legal framework. Legalizing same-sex marriage is easy, because almost all of the law that applies to mixed-sex marriages also applies to same-sex marriages; e.g., divorce law, property settlement, rights of survivorship, etc. Legalizing polygamy would require a legislative and litigative framework to resolve all the legal problems that arise within polygamous families. For example, how do we handle property settlement when 1 of many wives wants a divorce? In the United States right now we have a de facto decriminalization of polygamy. Unless you make a lot of noise about being polygamous or do something illegal in connection with polygamy (like marriages to underaged individuals), nobody is going to bother you. Eventually, de jure decriminalization will make it perfectly legal to marry multiple partners, but real legalization will remain very far off. I don't think that your legal reasoning is correct. Because there is no legal framework that is being denied to polygamists, there is no issue of equal protection.

By: annegb

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:30:54 +0000

Matt, what did Phil Barlow say about the church and Republicans?