Legality of polygamy in the United States
Polygamy was outlawed in federal territories by the 1882 Edmunds Act, and there are laws against the practice in all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Guam,[1] and Puerto Rico.
590, 55 So.2d 228) treat bigamy as a strict liability crime: in some jurisdictions, a person can be convicted of a felony even if he reasonably believed he had only one legal spouse.
[5] However, because state laws exist, polygamy is not actively prosecuted at the federal level,[3] but the practice is considered "against public policy".
[8]: 422 While, the Act outlawed bigamy in the US territories, it was seen to be largely weak and infective at preventing people from practicing polygamy.
[9]: 447–449 [10]: 243–244 However, due to the continuous threat of legislation targeting polygamy and the church, Brigham Young pretended to comply.
[15] The Cullom Bill would have prevented those practicing polygamy from voting, serving on a jury, holding public office, becoming a citizen of the United States, and receiving the benefits of the homestead laws.
[20] "Unlawful cohabitation," in which the prosecution did not need to prove that a marriage ceremony had taken place (only that a couple had lived together), was a misdemeanor punishable by a $300 fine and six months imprisonment.
[23] In 1879, the Supreme Court ruled that a defendant cannot claim a religious obligation as a valid defense to a crime and upheld the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act in Reynolds v. United States.
[citation needed] Even before the advent of licensing, many states enacted laws to prohibit plural marriage-style relationships.
[citation needed] Polygamy is a practice difficult to define since it virtually never occurs in the context of legal licensing.
Given that Mormon polygamists migrated to the Rocky Mountains in 1847, partly to escape prosecution for polygamy in the eastern states, efforts to curb the practice focused intensely on Utah and the surrounding territories in the 1800s.
[6]: 191 [9]: 438 Given that almost no polygamists bother to seek a second marriage license, the practice of forming a family with more than one spousal-styled relationship is very difficult to criminalize.
[44] Utah made the practice of polygamy a felony in 1935, after the LDS Church publicly repudiated it in 1890, in a document labeled 'The Manifesto'.
Prosecutions included Robert D. Foster, Steve Bronson, Mark Easterday, Thomas Green, and Rodney Holm.
Nevertheless, Utah has remained reluctant to pursue prosecutions for polygamy per se (i.e., absent associated welfare fraud or child abuse), citing a lack of resources, difficulties obtaining convincing evidence, and an understanding that any prosecution would trigger an inevitable appeal to the higher courts.
On December 13, 2013, a federal judge, spurred by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups,[47] struck down the parts of Utah's bigamy law that criminalized cohabitation, while also acknowledging that the state may still enforce bans on having multiple marriage licenses.
[48] The state of Utah appealed the decision, arguing that polygamist Kody Brown (whose relationships were documented in the show Sister Wives) lacked standing to bring his civil suit, since his county prosecutor, Jeff Buhman, had not followed through on any plan to prosecute the Brown family.
The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals (Denver) agreed with Utah and overturned the previous decision, thus effectively recriminalizing polygamy as a felony.
[49] In 2020, State Senator Deidre Henderson introduced a bill reducing the penalty for polygamy from a five-year prison sentence (as a felony) to an infraction.
As the Supreme Court justices who unanimously decided Reynolds in 1878 understood, marriage is also about sustaining the conditions in which freedom can thrive.
A hard-won lesson of Western history is that genuine democratic self-rule begins at the hearth of the monogamous family.
