In 1972 the National Coalition of Gay Organizations demanded the “repeal of all legislative provisions that restrict the sex or number of persons entering into a marriage unit; and the extension of legal benefits to all persons who cohabit regardless of sex or numbers.” So why aren’t homosexual activists leading the battle to legalize polygamy?

Maybe they’re smart enough to understand the visceral reaction most of us would feel if we knew their goal and playbook. Maybe the rest of us would get our backs up if we stopped believing it’s just about equal treatment of “two loving and committed same-sex couples.”

Maybe a whole lot of us need to care more about morality and the greater good of society and children in particular than we do about our self-centered obsessions about how “fair” and “loving” we’re perceived to be.

Consider just a few tidbits from major players:

At a [1999] conference at the University of London called “Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Marriage: A Conference on National European and International Law,” one of the main themes of discussion was whether marriage should exist at all. The attendees laid out strategies to circumvent each nation’s democratic process via the judicial system to force governments to sanction and accept same-sex marriage. There was open talk about ultimately abolishing marriage so adults could be free to pursue any sexual relationship they want with no legal restrictions whatsoever. (Alliance Defense Fund, “The Homosexual Agenda: Excerpt 2”: http://www.alliancedefensefund.org/issues/traditionalfamily/default.aspx?cid=3483).

It is also a chance to wholly transform the definition of family in American culture. It is the final tool with which to dismantle all sodomy statutes, get education about homosexuality and AIDS into public schools, and, in short, usher in a sea change in how society views and treats us. (Michelangelo Signorile, “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do,” OUT magazine, May 1996, p. 30).

“Generations of radicals have imagined a world in which the norm-making rules of matrimony are suspended. ... Down the road, we might see groups of people sharing the custody of children. …” (Richard Goldstein, “The Radical Case for Gay Marriage,” Village Voice, Sept. 3-9, 2003, p. 34).

In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court dropped a cluster bomb in Lawrence v. Texas. For the first time in its history, a majority of the Court rejected morality as a legitimate justification for a state criminal law. The Court declared unconstitutional a Texas law that prohibited homosexual sodomy in the privacy of the home.

Same-sex “marriage” advocates condemned the “scare tactics” of those who sounded the alarm regarding the threat that Lawrence posed to state marriage laws, including polygamy. The Lawrence bomblets began detonating and continue.

Less than five months after Lawrence, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ordered the State Legislature to allow homosexuals to marry, favorably citing Lawrence. The court reasoned:

“The history of constitutional law ‘is the story of the extension of constitutional rights and protections to people once ignored or excluded.’ … This statement is true in the area of civil marriage as in any other area of civil rights. … As a public institution and a right of fundamental importance, civil marriage is an evolving paradigm.” Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (Mass. 2003).

Polygamists are pushing the paradigm by arguing that if Heather can have two mommies, why not two mommies and a daddy? And come to think about it, aren’t two mommies and a daddy “better” than no mommy or no daddy?

A Utah husband and wife filed suit after being denied a marriage license for an additional wife. They argued that the Lawrence decision should be read to require Utah to permit polygamous marriage. The district court disagreed:

Giving the required deference to the Supreme Court’s own stated limitations of its Lawrence holding, this court cannot hold that Lawrence can be read to require the State of Utah to give formal recognition to a public relationship of a polygamous marriage. Contrary to Plaintiffs’ assertion, the laws in question here do not preclude their private sexual conduct. They do preclude the State of Utah from recognizing the marriage of Plaintiff G. Lee Cook to Plaintiff J. Branson as a valid marriage under the laws of the State of Utah. Bronson v. Swenson (D. Utah 2005).

The court, however, noted the tendency for laws to “evolve”: “Plaintiffs refer to the dissent of Justice Scalia in Lawrence, where he contends that the majority’s ruling will call into question state laws against bigamy, among other statutes that are based upon moral choices. … That is likely to be true.”

The case is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. The Goodridge majority took it upon themselves to redefine common law marriage yet, arbitrarily limited its new definition to two persons: “We construe civil marriage to mean the voluntary union of two persons as spouses to the exclusion of all others.”

The three dissenting justices in Goodridge argued that the Commonwealth’s marriage laws were gender neutral and did not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. Justice Spina wrote:

The marriage statutes do not disqualify individuals on the basis of sexual orientation from entering into marriage. All individuals, with certain exceptions not relevant here, are free to marry. Whether an individual chooses not to marry because of sexual orientation or any other reason should be of no concern to the court.”

The dissenters reasoned that by extending marriage to same-sex couples, the state’s laws against polygamy and incestuous marriages would fall.

The majority disagreed:

Similarly, no one argues that the restrictions on incestuous or polygamous marriages are so dependent on the marriage restriction that they too should fall if the marriage restriction falls. Nothing in our opinion today should be construed as relaxing or abrogating the consanguinity or polygamy prohibitions of our marriage laws. … Rather, the statutory provisions concerning consanguinity or polygamous marriages shall be construed in a gender neutral manner. Id. at 969.

Where does that leave bisexuals? How long until there’s a bisexual ménage a trois before the Massachusetts courts asking why bisexuals are “second-class” citizens in the Commonwealth?

Since the Goodridge court decided that the Commonwealth “failed to identify any constitutionally adequate reason for denying civil marriage to same-sex couples,” how likely is it that it will be able to articulate a constitutionally adequate reason to deny marriage to three people, especially when the court held that it may not treat some citizens as “second-class.”

How will the court rationalize that limiting marriage to two people can be applied in a “gender neutral manner” to bisexuals, when it refused to recognize that the prohibition against same-sex marriage applied in a gender neutral manner” to two men or two women regardless of “sexual orientation”? The court will be hard pressed to assert anything other than its own moral code, which it claimed it couldn’t’ do in Goodridge.

Justice Marshall, nonetheless, iced the slope for legalizing polygamy based on the best interests of children:

In this case, we are confronted with an entire, sizeable class of parents raising children who have absolutely no access to civil marriage and its protections because they are forbidden from procuring a marriage license. It cannot be rational under our laws, and indeed it is not permitted, to penalize children by depriving them of State benefits because the State disapproves of their parents’ sexual orientation.

Already, an estimated 30,000 to 80,000 families are living polygamously in the United States, including hundreds of Laotian Hmongs in Minnesota and thousands of fundamentalist Mormons in Arizona and Utah. (Cheryl Wetzstein, “The Marriage of Many: If homosexuals can ‘wed,’ will polygamists be next,” Washington Times, Dec. 11, 2005, p. A01).

Given the number of children in the average polygamous household, there’s no doubt that many more children are “deprived” of state benefits because of anti-bigamy laws than are children in homosexual households. Continued...