PG, I know what you mean but I would just add that many states have extremists, including typically “progressive” places like New York, California, etc. I’d look more closely at the attitudes of elected officials toward higher education than I would at their records serving their constituents along hot-button social issues.
Legalizing plural marriage would lead to immediate shovel ready jobs! Lawyers, tax accountants, wedding planners, specialized contractors for specialized houses.
We should get on it right now…the economy needs the help!
Oh absolutely, Sally.
“Legalizing plural marriage would lead to immediate shovel ready jobs! Lawyers, tax accountants, wedding planners, specialized contractors for specialized houses.”
My sister is a wedding planner in the NY/CT area. Almost all her clients are same sex couples. They spend whopping amounts of money on their weddings. People who refuse services to same sex couples are missing out on a lot of dosh.
What I can picture is a situation where a SS couple comes in to apply for a marriage license and is told no one in the office at the time can help them because of “sincerely held beliefs”, that the person who is able to process their request is out, and that it’s impossible to make an appointment to be helped by that person. Repeat the next week, and the week after, and the week after that… “We’re not denying your right to a marriage license. You just happened to get unlucky and be here when no one was able to help you.”
That will be declared illegal. The office has to provide marriage licenses to people who show up, and if an opposite-sex couple is able to go in and get a license, the same sex couple cannot be forced to wait around or return at a more propitious time. The court will order that office to supply marriage licenses to all qualified couples who show up.
The most common form of polygamy is polygyny (1 husband, >1 wife), while polyandry (1 wife, >1 husband), polygynandry (>1 wife, >1 husband) exist but are less common (same sex polygamy (>2 husbands, 0 wives or >2 wives, 0 husbands) seems to be nowhere on anyone’s radar).
Perhaps the fact that polygamy (generally polygyny) most often comes up in the news in the context of abuse of or heavy restrictions on women (e.g. in the KSA or the FLDS church in the US) makes it unpalatable for many who would otherwise take a liberal viewpoint on marriage matters (though the practical issues described in reply #425 mean that even those who may support allowing it in theory may not want it to happen immediately without other legal changes to handle it), even though it is not necessarily the case that polygamous marriages involve abuse or mistreatment.
Musicprnt, polygamy was banned among Ashkenazi Jews (then living primarily in France and Southern Germany) by the famous R. Gershom around 1000 C.E., although some question the attribution. One of the motivations was to protect wives from the fairly common situation in which a commercial traveler or merchant (a major Jewish occupation in the early medieval period) would spend most of the year traveling and would end up with other wives in different locations. In Spain, polygamy continued somewhat longer, especially when Spain was under Islamic rule, and polygamy was allowed in general society. In Europe and in places like Egypt and elsewhere in the Near East, the marriage contract (many of which were found in the Cairo Genizah) was a device often used to protect women and give them divorce rights – and the right to the return of the money their families put into the marriage – if their husbands did certain things like marrying another woman.
Nope, that will not fly with the courts, not one little bit.
I agree. I just anticipate some passive aggressive resistance to the ruling in addition to the direct defiance we’re hearing about plans for in the news right now.
Oh for sure, Sue, and maybe at some isolated locations the order will have to be enforced by the feds. But i actually think the whole south will capitulate fairly quickly. Right now some of them are still in a panic trying to find * some * way to get around the order, but they’ll soon discover that they can’t.
As I said, it’s not just the south… 
http://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw/index.ssf/2015/07/no_more_marriages_at_midland_c.html#incart_river
We need to do away with comments from the dumb and angry, on those media sites. 
I heard this NPR interview last evening and, like Steve Inskeep, couldn’t believe my ears:
In case we missed it, this is because:
His solution:
Which would save the Kochs a lot of money because they could bypass all those pesky legislative and executive elections, and go straight to the Court to create their Corporate States of America. I’d bet Cruz would think that was plenty legitimate.
http://www.npr.org/about-npr/418600824/complete-transcript-senator-ted-cruz-interview-with-npr-news
This guy graduated from Harvard Law!???
On a much easier note:
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/george-takei-on-marriage-and-donald-trump-473289795533?cid=sm_fb_lastword
Even Megyn Kelly thinks Cruz has gone off the deep end.
^ Now that’s surprising.
lol.
@donnal:
Thanks for your commentary in regards to Jews and Polygamy, I knew they had abolished it sometime around the time you mention, always learn something. One of the things that angers me to no end is when Christians cite Jewish scripture like Gensis and Leviticus, and read it with their fundamentalist slant. Besides the obvious thing, that they pick and choose what is 'God’s law" and what is “Jewish cultural law”, they also leave out that in Jewish tradition scripture is a very complex thing, from what I know of it, and Jewish understanding of scripture changes, it is why among other reasons the Talmud exists from what I know, and yet that type of Christian claims it is ‘written in stone’ so to speak. If they are going to read it like that, then they are being totally hypocritical if they ignore what Genesis said about marriage in trying to ban Polygamy.
The real problem was ever allowing legal marriage to be defined by religious marriage, it is like morality in general, law based on morality often ends up being arbitrary, capricious, and more often then not, oppressive. I think (I believe it was Madison, or maybe Jefferson) who said that if you mix church and state, you end up with an oppressive state and a corrupted church, something much on the minds of many of the founders of this country (sorry, Antonin, if we applied ‘original intent’, you and Alito would likely not be on the Supreme Court in the first place, most of the founders despised Catholics).
http://www.krtv.com/story/29450937/montana-polygamist-family-applies-for-marriage-license
That didn’t take long.