Iowa Defense Alliance

With the Iowa State Supreme Court set to begin hearing arguments next month on Iowa’s gay marriage ban and the whole chaos erupting over Proposition 8 in California, there is are some lingering questions I have about the issue of marriage as a “right”. At this point it is hard to change anybody’s mind on the matter and debate over gay marriage usually seems to go nowhere with both sides yelling so loud they can’t hear what each is saying. So, I’m not going to write a post about IDA’s position on the matter as most readers probably can figure it out.

However, I am going to ask a question: where does it stop? Where does extending the right to marry stop? The reason given for overturning gay marriage bans has rested on equal protection and due process. Now, I’m not a lawyer but I am curious to see if judges, lawyers, and gay rights activists feel that these rights should be extended to polygamist relationships or to marriage between an overage individual and an underage individual such as this case in Nebraska. Maggie Gallagher talks about this in an article from a couple of years back. Take note of the section about Jonathan Turely, a respected legal expert.

What about polygamy? Is that the natural next step? When people ask me this, my stock answer has become, “I don’t know, go ask the guys in the Harvard Law School faculty lounge.” Because if the California decision stands, there simply is no longer any case to be made we have begun to win the war for judicial restraint. If a court can rule that same-sex marriage is a fundamental right (i.e., one deeply rooted in our nation’s traditions) then it can make up anything. Elite legal minds get to figure out what they think and break it to the rest of us once they’ve decided.

The Washington Blade, one of the nation’s leading gay newspapers, took up this question more thoughtfully than I do in its June 6 issue. The experts they consulted are somewhat divided on the question. But Prof. Jonathan Turley, for one, calls on gay-marriage advocates to make a clean breast of what the new “right-to-marry” principle means: Adult polygamists who “do not believe in child brides,” he told the paper, should be allowed to formalize their relationships.

“I don’t like polygamy but that’s not what’s important here,” Prof. Turley said. “[T]here will have to be a new definition of marriage because it’s disingenuous to say that gays and lesbians should be included in marriage but then for them to exclude others.”

Columnist Charles Krauthammer takes up the issues in a 2006 article:

As Newsweek notes, these stirrings for the mainstreaming of polygamy (or, more accurately, polyamory) have their roots in the increasing legitimization of gay marriage. In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one’s autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement — the number restriction (two and only two) — is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.

So the question remains, where does it stop?