Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship
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Mormon Studies Review

K. Mohrman

Keywords

Mormonism, marriage, political culture, same-sex marriage

Abstract

In his dissent to Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision

that determined marriage was a right that could not be constitutionally

denied to same-sex couples under the Free Exercise and

Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, Chief Justice

John Roberts queried, “if ‘[t]here is dignity in the bond between

two men or two women who seek to marry and in their autonomy to

make such profound choices,’ . . . why would there be any less dignity

in the bond between three people, who in exercising their autonomy,

seek to make the profound choice to marry?”1 In asking this question,

Roberts rehearsed an oft-repeated slippery-slope argument about the

consequences of legalizing gay marriage, popular among conservative

figures, politicians, and activists.2 “It is striking,” he noted, “how much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage,” citing a case that, at the time, was pending appeal at the Tenth Circuit.3 Brought to court by the polygamous Brown family featured on TLC’s popular reality TV series Sister Wives, the case, Brown v. Buhman, challenged 150 years of marriage law in Utah by asserting that the state’s criminalization of “cohabitation” was unconstitutional.4 In citing the ongoing Brown case, Roberts highlighted both the extent to which polygamy still serves as a specter hanging over contemporary marriage debates and its vitality as an animate legal question.5.

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