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manages to father a couple dozen children. In those circumstances, no one would be surprised if Green’s conduct earned him widespread scorn and ridicule. But we’d be very surprised if it got him sent to jail.
The real Tom Green is a bit different. He’s a pot-bellied, 53-year-old salesman, not a glamorous professional athlete. Instead of having affairs with an assortment of partners, he’s been living with five wives in a polygamous household in the Utah desert, along with most of their 30 children. And no one seems shocked that last week, a Utah court sentenced him to five years in prison on four counts of bigamy.
Green is a so-called Mormon fundamentalist who thinks he has a religious duty to practice “plural marriage,” as the original Mormons who settled the state did. Utah, however, had to ban polygamy as a condition of joining the United States, and Green’s outspoken defiance of the law got him in trouble with the local prosecutor.
In an era of sexual freedom, there’s something quaint about prosecuting someone because he insists on formalizing his relationships with multiple women and the children he’s fathered with them. We generally no longer enforce laws against fornication, adultery and sodomy, which are regarded as infringements on the right of people to live their lives as they choose. Still, though a man may have five girlfriends, and a woman may enjoy several suitors, the law says spouses are one to a customer.
Green is not the ideal poster boy for efforts to repeal such policies. Many of his wives were 14 or 15 years old when they married him, and he faces child rape charges because one of them allegedly was only 13 when he impregnated her. Besides the bigamy counts, he was convicted of failing to support his children and has to reimburse the state nearly $80,000.
If Green is a child molester and welfare cheat, he ought to be prosecuted for those offenses. There is no good reason to put somebody in jail merely for living openly with more than one spouse.
Laws against bigamy almost always address an entirely different form of misconduct: fraud. Most men who are prosecuted for bigamy have two or more wives who don’t know about each other. A guy will leave one woman and marry another without first getting a divorce, or he’ll pretend to be a faithful husband to each of two women living in separate cities.
In those cases, the crime has victims who were grossly deceived. But when a man whose religion dictates plural marriage embarks on matrimony with women who accept the deal as consenting adults, their living arrangements should be treated as their own affair.
Polygamy opponents may reply that Green and Co. can live however they choose — they just can’t enjoy the benefits of a state-sanctioned institution. The same excuse is used to justify the ban on gay marriage.
Denying the institution of marriage to gays and polygamists only discourages responsible adult behavior. Men who want to pursue all manner of fleeting sexual encounters — with numerous partners of the same or the opposite sex — are not inconvenienced. The only ones who suffer are those willing to accept the socially valuable constraints of matrimony. How does society gain from that?
Likewise, the ban on polygamy doesn’t prevent thousands of polygamists from practicing their beliefs in the shadows, where they won’t attract official scrutiny. By forcing them underground, in fact, the law breeds the very abuses decried by opponents, since the victims may fear that going to authorities will mean destroying the family.
It’s not even clear that the ban on polygamy is constitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down laws against contraceptive sales and abortion because they intrude on intimate personal decisions involving family, marriage and procreation. Polygamy laws make the same intrusion into this private realm.
Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia has suggested as much. He dissented from a 1996 decision that struck down a Colorado constitutional amendment barring local governments from adopting gay-rights laws because it targeted one group for unfavorable treatment. Polygamists, argued Scalia, have been singled out “for much more severe treatment” than gays, and under the court’s reasoning, “polygamy must be permitted.”
The Supreme Court and the American public may take some time to get used to the idea of letting people choose such arrangements. But someday we may recognize that if people want to engage in polygamy, it’s really not our business to stop them.
What we lost — and what we will keep
Wednesday, September 12, 2001
The scenes of apocalypse that transfixed Americans Tuesday evoked feelings of panic, helplessness and acute vulnerability in a nation accustomed to tranquility. For an enemy to strike multiple targets on the U.S. mainland is an experience no living American can recall.
Not since the Cuban missile crisis, when Americans confronted the possibility of being incinerated in a nuclear war, have we been reminded so forcefully that the bloodshed which afflicts so much of the world can migrate here as well.
There was an immediate sense that life in this isle of peace will never be the same again. “We are at war,” said one expert after another. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) called the wave of terrorist attacks “the second Pearl Harbor.” One Chicagoan on the street said to another, with grim irony, “Welcome to Jerusalem.”
It may be hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the loss or the enormity of the crime. The scope of the carnage strained comprehension — and the repercussions it will have in the days and years to come are almost without limit. Countless lives will be marred, deeply and indelibly, by what happened. For Americans as a whole, Sept. 11, 2001, is a date that will forever live in infamy.
It is easy, though, to overestimate the impact the attacks will have on our personal safety and our way of life. America is indeed at war, with someone. But this is not the Cold War, when thousands of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles were poised to annihilate hundreds of millions of people within the hour. This is not World War II, when we faced mighty nations with formidable, far-reaching military machines, implacably intent on forcing us to submit to their will.
The terrorist organization or government that struck these blows may be diabolical, ingenious, determined, and well-financed. Still, the chances are good that what it achieved Tuesday is not the beginning of the war, but the beginning of the war’s end. Launching a series of strikes at American targets means leaving fingerprints behind.
The terrorists are in the position of an archer hunting a grizzly bear, who may enjoy the advantages of concealment as long as he holds his fire. Once he releases an arrow that fails to kill his quarry, he faces detection and terrible retribution.
Tracking the murderers to their lair may be challenging and time-consuming, but it can be done — and it’s reasonable to wager that, in time, it will be done. In the meantime, the enemy’s main preoccupation is not to hit more U.S. targets but to avoid being hit. This triumph was far easier to pull off than it will be to replicate.
Whoever ends up being responsible for these appalling barbarities can’t count on living long to savor the achievement. Any restraint that the U.S. government might have observed in locating its worst enemies and eliminating them will be gone. Sooner or later, the American military is bound to exact punishment on those responsible.
Retaliation, as the Israelis can attest, doesn’t necessarily eliminate the threat, either immediately or eventually. Kill one militant leader, and new leaders and followers will sprout. Every “martyr” we create may spawn more fanatics eager to sacrifice themselves to their cause.
But the U.S., unlike most governments grappling with terrorists, has the protection of distance. We aren’t trying to contain an enemy on our borders. We aren’t trying to rule over an alien and hostile populace. We don’t face the endless challenge of trying to cope with what amounts to an armed rebellion or a civil war within our borders.
We can take modest steps to enhance our security. Tighter airport security, of the sort that Israelis take for granted, ought to be able to prevent airline hijackings, which turn out to pose a much broader peril than anyone imagined. We have allies worldwide whom we can call on for help in defusing the danger.
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