Sometimes senators’ predications come true. At least that’s what it looked like this week in Salt Lake City. It’s there that a lawyer for a Utah man with five wives argued that his burglary out following a U.S. Supreme Court decision decriminalizing homosexual sex.
The nation’s high court in June struck down a Texas sodomy law, ruling that homosexual men and women have the right to do anything in the privacy of their homes without government intervention.
Now convicted polygamist Tom Green says it should be no different for him. And that is exactly the kind of argument that Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) warned earlier this year would result from a decision by the Supreme Court to strike down sodomy laws in Texas.
“If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home,” Santorum said, “then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.”
Green’s attorney, John Bucher, argued just that in an appeal to the Utah Supreme Court Dec. 1. “It doesn’t bother anyone, [and with] no compelling state interest in what you do in your own home with consenting adults, you should be allowed to do so,” he said.
Green, who is not affiliated with any church, was convicted of four counts of bigamy and one count of criminal nonsupport of his 30 children in August 2001. Besides his five-year sentence, he faces up to life in prison after being convicted of child rape for having sex with one of his five wives when she was 13.
The state said that court should reject Green’s appeal because he failed to raise the issue during his trial more than two years ago or anywhere else along the judicial path since then.
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, expects Green will ultimately lose his appeal, but said it will be increasingly difficult over time for courts to uphold some deviant sexual practices but not others. “While Green [may] lose his case,” Perkins said, “it is certainly probable that court-mandated ‘privacy’ will soon cover not only homosexual conduct and ‘marriage,’ but polygamy and all other sorts of sexual deviances as well.”
(EP)
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