Some unions go too far
 
By Boston Herald editorial staff
 
The latest "rights" cause, according to Newsweek, is polygamy.

Doubt it? Check your TV. HBO has begun a series "Big Love," a sympathetic look at a man with three wives.

In a case before the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, a Utah couple is appealing the refusal of the state to grant a second marriage license. Their lawyer, Brian Barnard, argues that under the Supreme Court’s Lawrence vs. Texas decision in 2003 overthrowing state laws against sodomy, individuals have, as the majority put it, "the full right to engage in private conduct without government intervention: - including taking more than one spouse.

Some slopes are indeed slippery, as Massachusetts learned when the Lawrence decision was used as the basis of the state Supreme Judicial Court’s discovery of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

It’s unlikely the current U.S. Supreme Court would accept Barnard’s argument, if it gets that far, but you never can tell.

There are good reasons why Western societies outlaw polygamy. First, experience shows that polygamists are mostly men who claim wives in their teens before they are capable of any choice.

But coercion aside, there’s the principle of "one to a customer." If one man may claim seven wives, then six men must remain without wives, because nature provides roughly equal numbers of men and women.

This is not a theoretical worry. In northern Arizona and southern Utah, a dissident Mormon sect of an estimated 30,000 members practices polygamy. A Salt Lake City foundation, Smiles for Diversity, tries to help the resulting "lost boys" - teenagers, sometimes literally driven far out of town and left by the side of the road, expelled to make sure there are enough unattached young women for the powerful older men. (Lawyers for the sect have argued that the boys were delinquents.)

Marriage is still an institution guarded by the state to protect those in it. Those protections would break down with multiple spouses.
 
bostonherald.com
Originally published Saturday, March 18, 2006
 
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