Let’s Get Poly-Married? Not So Fast…

By Maria Padhila

The big news in polyamory lately (sorry about missing last week — was sick, and now my daughter appears to have it) was the Brown v. Utah decision that decriminalizes polygamy in Utah.

Now, you can have a ceremony (not a civil one, but any other kind) and call yourself husband, wife, sister-wife (which I actually find kind of creepy. Isaac and Chris sometimes call each other “brotha,” but that’s kind of what guys do nowadays, along with that sort of half-hug fist-bump thing.), or sweetie; you can live together and in whatever room(s) you choose, and the law is not going to interfere with any of that, nor with who buys the groceries or who takes out the trash.

Gee, thanks, courts! For not busting about half of the rest of the people on the planet who live more than two adults to a household! How kind.

I should not be so cynical, because it is pretty important. The Salt Lake Tribune’s “Polygamy Blog” has a neat FAQ-style rundown on the decision and the context. And Alan P (P stands for perspicacious) has a synopsis and links to diverse commentary and to the judge’s full opinion on his “Polyamory in the Media” blog.

As Alan P writes:

Even if these laws are rarely enforced, they can have effects on employment discrimination and child custody cases. Note that as far as governments are concerned, the Brown family is identical to a polyamorous group. They claim only one legally recognized marriage among them (between Kody Brown and his first wife), and the others file their taxes and so forth as single persons.

It’s being cast as an agreement that “makes polyamory legal,” but at base it’s a decision that extends greater freedom for groups of people (a.k.a. “families,” if that term hadn’t been co-opted by the Christian right wing) to live as they see fit. Corporations seem to have more rights, protections and freedom to bed down together with whoever they please these days than do freely choosing adults. So even if you’re not poly (-amorous or -gamous, or even -androus), this decision is a good thing for you. Really!

The case grew out of a family featured on the Sister Wives reality TV show. From the Tribune, here’s the background:

Why did the “Sister Wives” family sue anyway? A 2010 investigation by Lehi police and the Utah County Attorney’s Office into whether the Browns were violating the bigamy statute helped give the Browns standing to file their lawsuit. While no charges were filed, the Browns argued their family — husband Kody and wives Meri, Janelle, Christin and Robyn and their 17 children — were living under threat of prosecution. (The federal lawsuit is titled “Brown v. Buhman” for Utah County Attorney Jeff Buhman.) The state contended the Browns had no standing to file a lawsuit so long as no criminal charges were filed, but lost that argument.

What about the claims polygamy is harmful to women and children? This was a big part of the state’s argument, but U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups didn’t buy it. He said the state presented no evidence of a correlation between polygamy and such crimes as child abuse, domestic abuse and failure to pay child support.

Around the same time an infographic popped up in my feed of a “Map of the Weirdest Sex Laws in the United States.” The law against adults living together and calling each other “sweetie” or whatever isn’t on there, but there are plenty more: adultery is illegal in New York; you can’t own more than six dildos in Texas. No more than two dildos per household in Arizona (but as long as they aren’t calling themselves “brother-husbands,” the cops will overlook it). And as the map creators point out, there are still state laws against oral and anal sex, “despite the Supreme Court shooting down sodomy laws in 2003.”

Selective enforcement is the issue here. And even if you’re not being selectively enforced against today, you could be the target tomorrow. For instance, it’s conceivable that in some of the lovely suburbs around the D.C. area, a triad or quad of tech professionals could live in peace and harmony with their neighbors, despite being four adults cohabitating and sleeping together and having four cars in the driveway (one of the standards used to persecute poor people who don’t “belong” in “nice” neighborhoods is to count the cars outside and issue citations). But the house down the street with four adults living in it is visited by the local police or by the county sheriff, because adults living there have Latino names and drive trucks that have seen better days.

Or the guy running the strip club on one side of the street, who wants to build up his business, blows the whistle on the guy with the club on the other side of the street for allowing one of the dancers to perform wearing a tiara, a practice outlawed since 1892, when the deputy’s wife was caught with her girlfriend but evaded prosecution because neither was wearing a tiara at the time. You get the point: Laws can be used as a weapon for whoever needs to do the hitting at a given time.

And because who doesn’t like a naked woman in a tiara.

And for the trifecta: around the same time came the reports that Al Goldstein, the former publisher of Screw magazine, was dead at 77. I was reluctant to segue into this story, because I don’t want a poly victory conflated with the remembrance of the creepiest denizens of 1970s-vintage Times Square. Like one side of my family might say, using an oft-employed expression: “It’s not good for the Jews.” Maybe not so good for the polyamorists, either.

But bear with me and you’ll see where I’m going with this: you don’t get just one side of the coin when it comes to freedom and justice. Goldstein’s obituary in The New York Times is one of those masterful obituaries that combines information and perspective to give a real feel for cultural change, and it’s also fucking hilarious.

Goldstein’s Screw magazine, founded in 1968, was the dark and dirty side of the Playboy culture. It was flat-out nasty, nothing masked or hidden; it was funny and profane and puerile; and it was the subject of significant legal activity. From the Goldstein obituary in The New York Times:

In 1973, … a United States Supreme Court decision made it easier to prosecute pornographers. Before then, one legal test for obscenity was whether a publication was “utterly without redeeming social value.” The 1973 decision broadened the definition to include material that lacked “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value,” and it empowered communities to set local standards for whether such material was obscene.

This led federal prosecutors to direct some postmasters in Kansas to order copies of Screw. Upon delivery, Mr. Goldstein was charged with 12 obscenity and conspiracy counts and faced up to 60 years in prison.

His lawyers argued that the anticensorship diatribes in Screw made the magazine sufficiently political, though Mr. Goldstein himself ridiculed this defense, insisting that a reader’s erection “is its own redeeming value.” After three years and two trials his conviction in the first was overturned, and the second ended in a hung jury. Mr. Goldstein’s company, Milky Way Productions, paid a $30,000 fine in return for the dropping of personal charges against him and Mr. Buckley.

Heh heh. Milky Way Productions. Heh heh. Anyway, to call the above sequence of events a witch hunt is too subtle. Federal prosecutors “directed” action that would result in prosecution. Oh, and the takeaway, that you’re free to talk sex all you like as long as you include politics, is fodder for an even louder “heh heh.”

From the sound of it, and from what I’ve heard and read over the years, Goldstein was a grotesque — and admitted being so himself: vengeful, petty, obsessive, even abusive. Alan Dershowitz, one of his defenders, says as much as well. But as Dershowitz makes the point, over and over in his work and writings, that this is a case of means and ends.

Freedom for our nice, loving, comfy, long-term, safe, secure-for-children poly families means freedom for those who are polygamous out of religious beliefs that I find offensive to reason and compassion. Advocating for this doesn’t mean accepting situations that don’t involve full, free consent by a capable adult, of course — that’s the kind of polygamy that gets brought out whenever there’s an argument against group marriage, and which the Utah judge wisely shut out. But it does involve some fighting for the rights of some bedfellows that even I would consider very strange.