Lawyers for Kody Brown and his plural family of the reality TV show "Sister Wives" are set to ask a federal appeals court that a ruling decriminalizing polygamy in Utah be upheld. This is the highest level the case has reached so far when the judges will hear on Thursday the arguments by state lawyers whether the state needs to ban plural marriages.
The Utah Attorney General appealed a ruling that removed vital parts of the state law that banned polygamy. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is in charge of the case. If the law stands, state attorneys say that Kody Brown and his four wives will not be charged with polygamy. However, the three-judge panel in Denver would want to know how the law affects Brown and his wives in a state like Utah which has a long been against prosecuting law abiding adults that are in polygamous marriages reports ABC News.
The Brown family claims their reality series "Sister Wives" shows that their plural family can be as healthy as any monogamous union. They argue that making plural marriages such as theirs a crime violates the right to privacy and religious freedom.
In 2013 according to The Chronicle Herald, the Browns won a legal victory after Judge Clark Waddoups found that a key part of Utah's bigamy law forbidding cohabitation violated the Brown's right to freedom of religion and dropped it. Bigamy, or holding multiple marriage licenses, is still illegal however. Kody Brown has a license for only one of his marriages and says his other unions are spiritual.
The decision was hailed as a landmark case that removed the threat of arrest for plural families, but Utah officials said that it could weaken their ability to go after polygamists like jailed leader Warren Jeffs, who was convicted of assaulting underage girls he considered as wives. Prosecutors often cite Jeffs' case as evidence that polygamy can be tied to other crimes such as statutory rape, sexual assault and exploitation of government benefits.
The Browns countered that there are already existing laws against those crimes and banning the practice will only sow distrust of authority. Their attorney Jonathan Turley also made reference to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage that shows laws restricting consensual adult relationships are considered obsolete even if certain unions are unpopular reports Chicago Tribune.
According to court documents, there are about 30,000 polygamists in Utah who believe the practice is a legacy of the early Mormon church. However, it has long been abandoned since 1890 by the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints and is still prohibited today.
