From the moment in 1896 that President Grover Cleveland signed the congressional act admitting Utah to the union as the 45th state until the governor’s signature, polygamy—the practice of one man having multiple wives—was a felony punishable by years in jail. To the present day, Utah’s constitution says polygamy is “forever forbidden.”
Herbert’s decision to go along with the nearly unanimous support of SB102 among state legislators got little national attention because the rest of the country was in the second week of the national lockdown amid the pandemic.
Utah decriminalizing polygamy is still a background issue, with America now convulsed by riots instigated in dozens of cities by radical left-wing anarchist groups such as Antifa seeking to exploit the tragic May 25 death of George Floyd after being improperly restrained by a Minneapolis policeman.
But the issue isn’t being ignored among defenders of traditional monogamous marriage, and not only because many of them predicted in the decade prior to its legalization that homosexual marriage would revive demands for re-legalization of polygamy.
“I and others made that argument on college campus stages all through the 2000s and would be booed and hissed about it, as like, ‘how ridiculous,’” Stanton said.
“But it’s wholly rational. There are now serious people arguing for polyamory [multiple women with multiple men], there are serious people arguing for polygamy.”
Stanton noted that Utah’s polygamy advocates “use the same language” as gay rights advocates who argue that “love is love ... so if you’re going to use that and that’s going to be your banner, then you’ve got to be consistent with that, and the polygamy people just made that case.”
Defenders of traditional monogamy like Stanton argue that recent history and social science leave no doubt that the one-man/one-wife family structure is best for everybody involved, but especially for women and children.
In their study summary, the authors noted that “the anthropological record indicates that approximately 85 percent of human societies have permitted men to have more than one wife (polygynous marriage), and both empirical and evolutionary considerations suggest that large absolute differences in wealth should favor more polygynous marriages.”
But in fact, they wrote, “monogamous marriage has spread across Europe, and more recently across the globe, even as absolute wealth differences have expanded.”
Based on the results of their study, the authors concluded that monogamy has become so widespread due to multiple factors associated with “suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men.”
Those factors result in reduced “crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery, and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses. By assuaging the competition for younger brides, normative monogamy decreases (i) the spousal age gap, (ii) fertility, and (iii) gender inequality.”
In addition, the authors said that “by shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment, and economic productivity.”
“By increasing the relatedness within households, normative monogamy reduces intra-household conflict, leading to lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death, and homicide.”
Fagan, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Family and Social Policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said how vigorously authorities should enforce laws against polygamy “is a prudential question. Decriminalization is not.”
He described Utah’s action as “a subversive act against a culture formed on marriage and family that, done deliberately at the highest levels of government, is also a crime against the truth of ‘for the good of the child, the next generation.’ It is a treacherous act to enshrine it in law.”
