A bill that would effectively decriminalize polygamy in Utah cleared a key hurdle on Wednesday, when it was overwhelmingly approved by the state’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
Currently, polygamy is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Under the bill, it would become a minor infraction similar to a traffic ticket, punishable by a fine of up to $750 and community service.
The goal of the bill is to encourage victims of abuse in polygamous marriages to come forward without fear of prosecution. But not surprisingly, some right-wingers claim the measure is a direct result of the legalization of same-sex marriage — just as Chief Justice John Roberts predicted in his dissenting opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges.
“[F]rom the standpoint of history and tradition, a leap from opposite-sex marriage to same-sex marriage is much greater than one from a two-person union to plural unions, which have deep roots in some cultures around the world,” Roberts wrote.
Over at the Federalist, columnist David Marcus responded to the Utah bill with an article titled, “Gay Marriage Was Always Leading to Polygamy.”
“Just like the fallacious claims that tearing down Confederate monuments would not lead to attacks on George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the plain logic of gay marriage always pointed in the direction of polygamy,” Marcus wrote. “The reason polygamy became inevitable is that once untethered from the concept of man and wife, there is simply no basis for constraining marriage to two people.
“The slippery slopes are real,” he added. “They are not fabricated conspiracy theories spun by bigoted conservatives; they are the obvious fallout of decisions we make as a society and nation.”
Also at the Federalist, Katy Faust and Stacy Manning penned a piece titled, “Push To Legalize Polygamy Uses Same Arguments As Push For Same-Sex Marriage.”
“The pro-gay and pro-poly scripts are one and the same because both view marriage as adult-centric,” they wrote. “That’s because when marriage is simply a vehicle for adult fulfillment, as per the Obergefell ruling [legalizing gay marriage nationwide], marriage morphs into whatever assemblage makes adults happy.”
Meanwhile, at LifeSite News, Jonathon Van Maren invoked the slowly boiled frog fable.
“A few years ago, the best way to trigger an advocate for redefining marriage to include same-sex couples would be to note that once the gender of those involved in the marriage became arbitrary, there really was no reason, strictly speaking, that the number of partners involved should be limited, either,” Van Maren wrote. “It was ludicrous to claim that those who wished to redefine an institution that was thousands of years old would not stop with one radical change, they said, and anyone who said otherwise was simply a raging homophobe.
“Those were the good old days,” he added. “Since then, major newspapers and other media outlets have persistently produced glowing stories on all sorts of sexual arrangements, with headlines asking (speculatively, of course) whether or not “polyamory” might just be the next big thing. Never mind that there wasn’t going to be a big next thing—once the sexual revolutionaries achieve one objective, they move seamlessly on to the next one, totally ignoring their previous outrage at being accused of the very thing they are now doing. Outrage is a convenient tactic. Sincerity is not.”
