Assalamu'alaikum wr. wb.
Jonathan Turley, seorang profesor bidang hukum di Sekolah
Tinggi Hukun George Washington, U.S.A melalui sebuah artikel
di harian "USA Today" mengusulkan legalisasi dari praktek
poligami.
Dasar argumentasi yang digunakan oleh Turley adalah karena
hukum resmi yang berlaku di USA (kecuali di negara bagian
Utah di mana komunitas sekte Mormon - yang juga membolehkan
poligami - umumnya tinggal) sudah tidak "realistis" lagi
dan terasa "hiprokrit" dengan kenyataan praktek kehidupan
sosial yang ada di masyarakat. Sementara kebebasan seksual
tidak dibatasi: Artinya orang boleh mempunyai partner seks
sebanyak mereka suka, tanpa di beri sanksi hukum. Sementara
itu jika partner seks ini kemudian membuat komitment dalam
bentuk ikatan pernikahan poligami, justeru diancam oleh
hukuman penjara.
================================================* Wulung *====
<http://www.rense.com >
Floodgates Open - USA
Today Promotes Polygamy
By Albert Mohler
10-5-4
Readers of Monday's edition of USA Today must have been shocked
to read Jonathan Turley's article promoting the legalization of
polygamy. Then again, it is becoming harder and harder to shock the
American people. In any event, the article serves to prove the point
that acceptance of homosexual marriage will open the floodgates to
the normalization of any and all sexual relationships.
Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George
Washington Law School, is a well-known legal scholar. Indeed, he is
one of America's foremost constitutional specialists, whose face
became familiar to most Americans through media coverage of the
Clinton sex scandals and the former president's impeachment trial.
Turley offers a voice of professorial reason, and he has not been
closely identified with social activism. Nevertheless, in his
article published in USA Today, he presents a forceful case for
the legalization of polygamy.
In the background is a case out of Utah which may lead the U.S.
Supreme Court to review the right of states to criminalize polygamy.
The plaintiff in that case, Tom Green, is a Utah polygamist who has
been convicted in Utah, but has now appealed to the Supreme Court,
citing the Court's 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas which struck down
laws criminalizing sodomy. As Turley comments, "If the court agrees
to take the case, it would be forced to confront a 126-year-old
decision allowing states to criminalize polygamy that few would find
credible today, even as they reject the practice. And it could be
forced to address glaring contradictions created in recent decisions
of constitutional law."
As Turley sees it, laws against polygamy run counter to the logic of
the constitution and lack credibility in today's context of sexual
revolution. "Individuals have a recognized constitutional right to
engage in any form of consensual sexual relationship with any number
of partners," Turley argues. "Thus, a person can live with multiple
partners and even sire children from different partners so long as
they do not marry. However, when that same person accepts a legal
commitment for those partners 'as a spouse,' we jail them."
The professor's logic makes sense--if we accept his premise that
citizens have "a recognized constitutional right" to engage in any
form of consensual sex with any number of partners, without respect
to gender. As he sees it, criminalizing polygamy is nothing more
than a form of national hypocrisy. Since no existing laws
criminalize the sexual behavior, the criminalization is directed
only at those who would solemnize their sexual relationships by
claiming the institution of marriage. As Turley and polygamists see
it, "it is simply a matter of unequal treatment under the law."
Beyond all this, Turley sees religious liberty as an underlying
issue. "The difference between a polygamist and a follower of
an 'alternative lifestyle' is often religion," he explains. And that
religion in this case is Mormonism. The Mormon practice of polygamy
was controversial from the start, and opposition to polygamy was in
part what drove the Mormons to the Utah territory in 1847. Mormon
leader Brigham Young, later governor of the Utah territory, taught
that Mormons would put their salvation at risk by refusing to accept
polygamy. However, the federal government and public opinion were
adamantly opposed to polygamy, and the issue became the major
obstacle to Utah's acceptance as a state. In 1862, Congress passed
the Moral Anti-Bigamy Act, which outlawed polygamy in U.S.
territories. The bill was signed into law by President Abraham
Lincoln, and the nation waited to see how Mormons would respond. The
answer came quickly when in 1874 Brigham Young's personal secretary,
a man named George Reynolds, set himself up as defendant in a test
case to contest the constitutionality of the moral act. In 1878, the
High Court upheld the act in the case Reynolds v. United States.
In his USA Today article, Professor Turley levels his guns at that
1878 opinion, charging that the court "refused to recognize polygamy
as a legitimate religious practice, dismissing it in racist and anti-
Mormon terms as 'almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic
and African people.'" Later, the court would declare polygamy to be
both "a blot on our civilization" and "a return to barbarism."
According to Turley, this is an undeniable violation of the
Constitution's free exercise clause. "Given this history and the
long religious traditions, it cannot be seriously denied that
polygamy is a legitimate religious belief," Turley asserts. "Since
polygamy is a criminal offense, polygamists do not seek marriage
licenses. However, even living as married can send you to prison.
Prosecutors have asked courts to declare a person as married under
common law and then convicted them of polygamy."
Turley does not advocate polygamy, insisting that he detests the
very concept. "Yet if we yield our impulse and single out one hated
minority, the First Amendment becomes little more than hype and we
become little more than hypocrites," he urges. "For my part, I would
rather have a neighbor with different spouses than a country with
different standards for its citizens."
But does the criminalization of polygamy violate the Constitution's
free exercise clause? In its 1878 decision, the Supreme Court ruled
that it did not. As evidence, the court cited the state of
Virginia's adoption of a law criminalizing polygamy after it had
passed an act establishing religious freedom and after the state's
constitutional convention had sought an amendment to the
Constitution of the United States stipulating that "all men have an
equal, natural, and unalienable right to the free exercise of
religion, according to the dictates of conscience." Only after
adopting these safeguards to religious liberty did Virginia adopt
the statute first set down by King James I of England, making
polygamy a criminal offense punishable by death.
When Turley dismisses this argument, he is laying the groundwork for
arguments to be put before the Court citing religious liberty as the
justification for decriminalizing polygamy. In reality, however,
laws against polygamy are more likely to be struck down on other
grounds--the very grounds used to promote same-sex marriage.
As Stanley Kurtz noted in a seminal article first published in the
August 4-11, 2003 edition of The Weekly Standard, "Among the
likeliest effects of gay marriage is to take us down a slippery
slope to legalized polygamy and 'polyamory' (group marriage).
Marriage will be transformed into a variety of relationship
contracts, linking two, three, or more individuals (however weakly
and temporarily) in every conceivable combination of male and
female."
Kurtz is indisputably correct in this assessment, but same-sex
marriage advocates routinely dismiss such claims as scare language
and reckless hyperbole. Kurtz dismisses their evasion. "The bottom
of this slope is visible from where we stand. Advocacy of legalized
polygamy is growing. A network of grass-roots organizations seeking
legal recognition for group marriage already exists. The cause of
legalized group marriage is championed by a powerful faction of
family law specialists. Influential legal bodies in both the United
States and Canada have presented radical programs of marital reform.
Some of these quasi-governmental proposals go so far as to suggest
the abolition of marriage. The ideas behind this movement have
already achieved surprising influence with a prominent American
politician."
In 2000, after the state of Vermont had adopted legislation allowing
civil unions, Matt Coles of the American Civil Liberties Union's
Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, asserted: "I think the idea that
there is some kind of slippery slope [to polygamy] is silly."
Nevertheless, the ACLU has intervened in Tom Green's case and has
declared its support for the decriminalization of all "laws
prohibiting or penalizing the practice of plural marriage." If Matt
Coles can't see the slippery slope, it is because he is already
standing at its bottom.
Jonathan Turley's article may serve as a catalyst for future legal
developments, but Stanley Kurtz's article in The Weekly Standard
offers a powerful and persuasive refutation of the pro-polygamist
arguments. Kurtz reviews developments at the level of popular
culture, noticing the emergence of polygamist and polyamorist groups
and the publication of Loving More, which he describes as "the
flagship magazine of the polyamory movement."
More frightening still is the survey Kurtz provides of developments
among family law radicals. As he notes, "State-sanctioned polyamory
is now the cutting-edge issue among scholars of family law." Kurtz
provides ample documentation for this claim, demonstrating beyond
doubt that the real agenda behind calls for decriminalizing polygamy
is the destruction of marriage as our society's normative
institution. Martha Fineman, Professor of Law at Cornell University,
has argued for the elimination of marriage as a legal category.
University of Utah law professor Martha Ertman, described by Kurtz
as "standing on the cutting edge of family law," argues for
eliminating all distinctions between traditional marriage and
polyamory, rendering the issue "morally neutral." Martha Minow,
professor at the Harvard Law School, wants a complete transformation
of family law. As Kurtz explains, "Minow argues that families need
to be radically redefined, putting blood ties and traditional legal
arrangements aside and attending instead to the functional realities
of new family configurations." Kurtz notes that in their 2002 book
Joined at the Heart, former vice president Al Gore and his wife
Tipper used Minow's definition of a family: It is any group "joined
at the heart" regardless of relationship established by blood or
law.
We get the point. If marriage is not culturally understood and
legally defined as a relationship between a man and a woman, it can
and will mean anything. Those who claim that marriage can be
redefined to allow same-sex relationships without destroying the
institution itself are lying to themselves and to the public.
Jonathan Turley's article serves as a signal of where the debate
over marriage is going. Once again, the courts stand at the center
of this cultural conflict. All this goes to show once again that we
will either define marriage for the courts, or the courts will
define marriage for us. Can there be any doubt where this is headed?
R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. For more articles and
resources by Dr. Mohler, and for information on The Albert Mohler
Program, a daily national radio program broadcast on the Salem Radio
Network, go to www.albertmohler.com. For information on The Southern
Baptist Theological Seminary, go to www.sbts.edu. Send feedback to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.crosswalk.com/news/weblogs/mohler/1288435.html?view=print
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