I’m catching up on “Sister Wives” since getting Hulu recently. Several years ago they moved the entire family from Utah because they were afraid of being investigated and maybe prosecuted. So, help me with this…the man is married legally to only one woman, the other “marriages” are just religious in nature, they aren’t valid. So, how is it illegal? If a man blatantly marries two different women if two different places and keeps it all totally secret one from another, now that I can see. The state in good faith issued marriage licenses for both. This Kody dude isn’t trying to do that. So, why, in actuality is polygamy illegal? I know that sounds stupid. But people live together all over creation and have kids and never marry. Why is this different? Just because he calls each “wife” doesn’t make it so.
Part of Utah’s anti-polygamy laws were declared unconstitutional in 2013. They had to do with prohibiting multiple cohabitation (similar to common law marriage). I believe this is the section of the law they were concerned with on “Sister Wives”. Really, the only reason that was the law was because of religious objections of those who wrote the law, hence why it was declared unconstitutional.
The act of polygamy was deemed illegal in the US in the 1800s and Utah agreed to comply in order to be come a state. From what I have read, people who study the legal aspect of marriage expect the polygamy laws to fall in the future. How soon? Who knows.
@guineagirl96 - In April 2016, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a 2013 ruling that struck down key parts of Utah’s law against bigamy, a move that restored Utah’s ban on polygamy. I don’t yet see what happened after that.
edit – here it is : It is still a crime since the US Supreme Court decline to hear the case (in Jan 2017), letting the lower court ruling stand.
@TQfromtheU Ah I didn’t know that it’d been appealed. That’s a shame.
A lot of the western states do have common law marriage. What they are doing would be against Colorado law, IMO, because all Colorado requires is for you to declare yourself as husband and wife and hold yourself out that way to society. They are certainly doing that. I don’t know what Utah or Nevada require.
Utah has been known to go after polygamists because it is often the case that the second, third, etc. wives are collecting benefits like SNAP and TNIF because there is no male in the household (his legal address is with wife #1). There was one large family where they were all on benefits, from medicaid to TNIF, and the only job anyone in the family had (father) was selling magazines by phone.
It is a television show, it isn’t reality. This was a family looking to make money, not change the law to be fair to polygs, there are polygamist families all over living quietly, dressing in holly hobby clothes shopping at Costco and driving escalades. None of them look like this family of morons. They look like the scary types that would marry little sara to uncle jonny. They are not looking for a production company to cover that.