Here’s a column by John Corvino claiming that “Polygamy Illogic Strikes Again” in regard to an argument against homosexual marriage.

I would ask readers to compare these claims with recent court cases reported by Redstate.com. Since this blog entry includes a bunch of other judicial decisions, I’ll reproduce the relevant ones with what I think is some pretty accurate commentary.

Finally, we turn to the progeny of Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 decision in which the Supreme Court announced a constitutional right to sodomy between consenting adults, premised upon a right of sexual privacy:

The statutes do seek to control a personal relationship that, whether or not entitled to formal recognition in the law, is within the liberty of persons to choose without being punished as criminals.

This, as a general rule, should counsel against attempts by the State, or a court, to define the meaning of the relationship or to set its boundaries absent injury to a person or abuse of an institution the law protects. It suffices for us to acknowledge that adults may choose to enter upon this relationship in the confines of their homes and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons. When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring. The liberty protected by the Constitution allows homosexual persons the right to make this choice.

Unsurprisingly, the Lawrence decision has spawned to a battery of attempts to expand its rationale to other laws governing sexual conduct of one sort or another. First, the Supreme Court this past week declined to review the decision of the Supreme Court of Utah in State v. Holm (Utah May 16, 2006), which among other things rejected (over a dissent) a claim that Lawrence invalidated Utah’s prohibition on bigamy. The court first stressed the Lawrence Court’s drawing of lines intended to limit the decision’s application:

Despite its use of seemingly sweeping language, the holding in Lawrence is actually quite narrow. Specifically, the Court takes pains to limit the opinion’s reach to decriminalizing private and intimate acts engaged in by consenting adult gays and lesbians. In fact, the Court went out of its way to exclude from protection conduct that causes “injury to a person or abuse of an institution the law protects.”

The Utah court found that the threat presented by bigamy to the institution of marriage justified a departure from Lawrence:

In marked contrast to the situation presented to the Court in Lawrence, this case implicates the public institution of marriage, an institution the law protects, and also involves a minor. In other words, this case presents the exact conduct identified by the Supreme Court in Lawrence as outside the scope of its holding.

First, the behavior at issue in this case is not confined to personal decisions made about sexual activity, but rather raises important questions about the State’s ability to regulate marital relationships and prevent the formation and propagation of marital forms that the citizens of the State deem harmful.

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[A] marriage license significantly alters the bond between two people because the State becomes a third party to the marital contract. . .

[M]arital relationships serve as the building blocks of our society. The State must be able to assert some level of control over those relationships to ensure the smooth operation of laws and further the proliferation of social unions our society deems beneficial while discouraging those deemed harmful. The people of this State have declared monogamy a beneficial marital form and have also declared polygamous relationships harmful.

The Connecticut Supreme Court, in State v. McKenzie-Adams, (Ct. Feb. 27, 2007), rejected a similar effort to extend Lawrence to the case of a male teacher who had consensual sexual relations with two 16-year-old female students and claimed a “right to engage in noncommercial consensual sexual intercourse with individuals over the age of consent.” The court found that the teacher-student relationship is “an inherently coercive relationship, . . . wherein consent might not easily be refused.” The Connecticut court, like the Utah court, found it necessary to place a limiting construction on Lawrence, albeit one that is in some tension with the Utah court’s reading of the case:

We conclude that the defendant’s reliance on Lawrence is misplaced because, contrary to the defendant’s claim, the court in Lawrence did not ignore the relationship between the participants to the prohibited sexual act. The court merely cautioned that, when reviewing a statute criminalizing private noncommercial consensual sexual conduct, it is improper to focus on the right to engage in specific sexual acts, as the court had done in Bowers. Instead, the court should focus on the right to foster certain intimate relationships. Accordingly, pursuant to Lawrence, the critical inquiry is whether the prohibited intimate relationship is within the liberty interest of the participants to choose, not on whether a right to engage in sexual conduct exists generally.

Finally, the Ohio Supreme Court, in State v. Lowe (Ohio Feb. 28, 2007), rejected (again over a dissent) an effort to use Lawrence to strike down a ban on consensual sexual conduct between a stepparent and adult stepchild. The Ohio court stressed that Lawrence did not announce a new fundamental right, and thus concluded:

[T]the state in this case distinguishes Lawrence as being limited to consensual sexual conduct between unrelated adults. Lowe and his stepdaughter were not unrelated. The state argues that since Lowe has no fundamental right in this case, and the state has a legitimate interest in prohibiting incestuous relations and in protecting the family unit and family relationships, the rational-basis test should apply. . .

. . . Lawrence did not announce a “fundamental” right to all consensual adult sexual activity, let alone consensual sex with one’s adult children or stepchildren.. . .

Ohio’s statute serves the legitimate state interest of protecting the family unit and family relationships. While it is not enough under the rational-basis test for the government to just announce a noble purpose behind a statute, the statute will pass if it is reasonably related to any legitimate state purpose. . . . Ohio has a tradition of acknowledging the “importance of maintaining the family unit.” A sexual relationship between a parent and child or a stepparent and stepchild is especially destructive to the family unit. R.C. 2907.03(A)(5) was designed to protect the family unit by criminalizing incest in Ohio. Stepchildren and adopted children have been included as possible victims of the crime of incest because society is concerned with the integrity of the family, including step and adoptive relationships as well as blood relationships, and sexual activity is equally disruptive, whatever the makeup of the family. . . . [P]arents do not cease being parents – whether natural parents, stepparents, or adoptive parents – when their minor child reaches the age of majority.

Accordingly, as applied in this case, R.C. 2907.03(A)(5) bears a rational relationship to the legitimate state interest in protecting the family, because it reasonably advances its goal of protection of the family unit from the destructive influence of sexual relationships between parents or stepparents and their children or stepchildren. If Lowe divorced his wife and no longer was a stepparent to his wife’s daughter, the stepparent-stepchild relationship would be dissolved. The statute would no longer apply in that case.

(As Howard Bashman has noted – and as the Utah court discussed footnote 10 at page 23 of its opinion, and the Connecticut court addressed as well – there have been other challenges based on Lawrence as well. In one, a recent 11ith Circuit decision that upheld Alabama’s ban on sale of sex toys on the grounds that unlike Lawrence “the statute at issue in this case forbids public, commercial activity” but also explicitly concluded that “public morality survives as a rational basis for legislation even after Lawrence, and we find that in this case the State’s interest in the preservation of public morality remains a rational basis for the challenged statute.” In another, the same issue presented in Lawrence was decided the opposite way in the context of the military’s ban on sodomy by the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (discussed here by Phil Carter)).

As it turns out, both Rick Santorum and his critics can claim some measure of vindication from the Utah, Connecticut and Ohio decisions. Santorum (who, you will recall, gave his famous interview before seeing precisely how the Supreme Court would frame its decision) has been proven right about the flood of efforts to use Lawrence to overturn well-settled prohibitions on sexual conduct long thought to be uncontroversially subject to criminal sanction, as well as about the fact that members of the judiciary (including the dissenters in Utah and Ohio) would find those arguments appealing. Santorum’s critics can point to the fact that the courts have, in fact, found ways to draw lines to keep Lawrence from having such slippery-slope effects.

At the end of the day, though, the stronger criticism of the Lawrence decision, like the Ninth Circuit’s decision in the T-shirt case, is that it sucks the courts into making a whole new body of law to distinguish between conduct that is favored and protected by the Constitution, and conduct that is disfavored and properly subject to societal sanction or regulation through the democratic process. But that body of law is not based on anything in the Constitution, but rather in the courts’ value judgments about social interests in the family, or the protection of students – judgments the legislatures are equally competent to make in a way that reflects the collective wisdom and experience of society. That’s why even the victories over efforts to expand the Lawrence decision are signs of defeat for judicial restraint in the culture wars.

So, on the one hand, since none of these court battles have been won (yet), we can say there is evidence the Polygamy argument doesn’t work. But I think the fact that they were tried and others will be also is telling.

Personally, I do think we can logically separate questions about libertarianism (no legal penalties for sodomy) from questions of marriage. But does anyone think the court’s decision on bigamy would have turned out the same if we had a legal precedent for the state recognition of samesex marriage?

I have plans to actually fisk the column when I have time. I just want to point out at the moment that, even if John were right about the logic of it, he is asking us to respond to an issue as if we can ignore what actually happens. How often are courts logical? The slippery-slope argument is not necessarily about logic (though I’m not agreeing with Corvino on this); it is about what is actually happening in real life. It simply makes no sense to ask people to stop opposing a disaster they are sure will take place because, according to logic, it doesn’t have to happen. It is happening, logical or not.