What do we do about the fact that the protection is policy, not state law? Haven’t the Boards of Visitors been given the authority to set policy?

Moon-howler :
We aren’t telling them they can’t all live together in the marriage paradigm…we are saying that the government is only going to recognize 1 union at a time. I think that is fair. If they want to divorce and remarry the next one, have at it.

Now that’s an interesting idea on how to solve the polygamy problem. Each “wife” gets her turn in the rotation – maybe every year you divorce one and marry the next one, and eventually you go back to the beginning and start over (assuming you don’t have too many wives to the point where you never reach the end of the line before you die)! That sounds like a fair and equitable solution and meets the technical requirement that you are only married to one person at the time. If you want to consider the rest of them your “wives” or “sister-wives” or whatever it is they call them – that’s fine!

Of course, divorces are messy – and I could forsee messy financial issues with this approach. I guess that would be solved by prenuptial agreements though!

Moon-howler :
Ok gentleman, should the government even be in the business of deciding what is marriage and what isnt? Shouldn’t they be recognizing the legalities of a union and leaving marriage to the churches and religious institutions?

That sort of makes sense to me. It goes back to my statement that personally, I don’t care whether it is a marriage recognized by the church, or one recognized by the gov’t.

Making those two things equal (the gov’t just recognizing any church/religious marriage) sort of makes sense to me.

Tax-person, I stand by my 1 at a time compromise. That’s what an entire group of people had to do to gain admission to the United States of America. If muslims don’t like it- TS. If polygamists don’t like it-TS.

We aren’t telling them they can’t all live together in the marriage paradigm…we are saying that the government is only going to recognize 1 union at a time. I think that is fair. If they want to divorce and remarry the next one, have at it.

Moon-howler :Tax-person…one more comment,… I also expect that mainstream LDS would oppose changing the law more than the rest of us.

Agreed. And I suspect they are just a little tired of taking the hits on poligamy. Fact is there are more Muslims in America than Mormans and poligamy is accepted within the Koran and is a vibrant part of their community. Nobody cares about what the Mormans want, but the Muslims — now that is a different story. Either you are for discrimination in the relm of marrige or not. Yes there can and should be some rules GR, but it canot be legal discrimination for one group, based on your personnal marrige preferences, and legal recognition for the other.

Anyway, as to Big Love, I wasn’t sure if Bill Hendrickson was just trying to legitimize polygamy within the Mormon religion (even though the mainstream Mormon’s no longer recognize polygmay) or get it more accepted by the greater society or the state of Utah. Then again, I admit to only have so far watched a little bit of the latest season. However, all that is a fictional TV series, so doesn’t really matter.

Anyway, it kind of boils down to the following – for me I really don’t care what the gov’t or a particular church/religion wants to recognize as marriage. Even including polygamy I suppose. Now, I know some of the polygamists think marrying off children is right – well that part isn’t. So that part of polygamy is definitely not OK, but on the other hand some states seem to be OK with marrying off people under the age of 18 as long as there is some kind of consent or something. That doesn’t make that right either of course. Whatever, for the most part it boils down to for me – I don’t have a big problem with what the gov’t or any religion wants to define as marriage between consenting adults. I guess the adult part is important and that takes out the crazy stuff with some polygamists wanting to marry underage women, etc.