Court Opinion

ID: 9796869
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 04:07:14.400459+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:50:52.310176
License: Public Domain

NEHRING, Justice,
concurring:
{107 I concur in the judgment of the majority. I write separately to address several of the important criticisms of the majority's analysis made by the Chief Justice that I believe the majority does not fully confront. These matters raised in the dissent deserve an answer because, despite the considerable persuasive force of the majority opinion, the conclusion reached today that the State may use its power to declare criminal consensual expressions of commitment between adults is one that by no means overwhelms Mr. Holm's counterarguments-specifically, his argument that the State lacks such power under the constitutions of the United States and the State of Utah.
*7531108 My misgivings over whether the power of the State may be constitutionally exercised to criminalize private relationships among adults led me to join in Chief Justice Durham's concurring opinion in Sate v. Green, 2004 UT 76, 99 P.3d 820, one of our recent examinations of polygamy. My uneasiness over the due process implications of state intrusion into private, consensual relationships voiced by the Chief Justice's concurrence in (Green, together with the personal and institutional considerations that I will shortly disclose, compels me to satisfy myself that the outcome of this case be anchored to a particularly solid legal foundation. I can, therefore, be at ease with joining the majority in Part I of its opinion only by overcoming to my satisfaction several of the Chief Justice's important points of disagreement with the lead opinion.
1109 Of course, this case is not unique because it presents close questions. Close cases are a staple of this court's docket. This case stands apart from other cases that put us to the test of wrestling uncertainty into submission because it probes a particularly sensitive area of our state's identity. No matter how widely known the natural wonders of Utah may become, no matter the extent that our citizens earn acclaim for their achievements, in the public mind Utah will forever be shackled to the practice of polygamy. This fact has been present in my consciousness, and I suspect has been a brooding presence in one form or another in the minds of my colleagues, from the moment we opened the parties' briefs. I also suspect that I have not been alone in speculating what the consequences might be were the highest court in the State of Utah the first in the nation to proclaim that polygamy enjoys constitutional protection. These musings have left me with little doubt that the predominant reaction to a holding in keeping with the Chief Justice's dissent would be highly charged and unflattering.
1 110 It would be a violation of my oath of office to permit my apprehensions about the public reaction to any ruling of this court to participate in my decision-making effort or to influence in any way my vote on a case. Moreover, I do not intend to suggest that the majority opinion is in any way shaped by fears of a public backlash against sanctioning polygamy. If I believed otherwise, I would not join in it. I hasten to add, however, that it is not altogether clear to me that we would betray our oath were we to take into account the potential effects of the outcome of a case on the institutional reputation of this court and public confidence in the integrity of the rule of law. No small part of the responsibility that the members of this court agree to assume is to stand resolutely against majority will when constitutional principles require it. We shoulder this duty willingly despite knowing that the decisions we make will inevitably vex, frustrate, and enrage many people, including persons of power and influence. Still, an outcome that is wholly defensible as a product of intellectual rigor and principled application of the law could, at the same time, be so much at odds with widely and deeply held cultural values that it would not only undermine the legitimacy of the ruling but call into question the institutional legitimacy of the court.
T111 I will not use this concurrence to embark on a lengthy exploration of this question of judicial philosophy and ethics. Rather, I raise it only to explain my reasons for writing separately. My awareness of the cultural and political volatility that polygamy brings to this court leaves me with a need to redouble my conviction that the flaws that the dissent perceives in the majority's analysis are confronted. I also write to distance myself from assertions made by the majority that, in my view, may be interpreted to invite, in the name of protecting marriage, unconstitutional governmental intrusions into consensual private relationships.
T 112 The organizing theme of the dissent is that when the Utah bigamy statute, section (2008), uses the word "marry," the meaning of that term is limited to a legal union. With the definition of "marry" confined in this way, one can "purport to marry" and thereby become a bigamist in the eyes of the law only by professing participation in multiple legal unions. According to the dissent, if marriage were to include extralegal or spiritual unions as the majority insists, one could expect to find some evidence of *754this broader definition in other provisions of Utah law where "marry" or "marriage" appears. But in every other context, including the recently enacted constitutional amendment, article I, section 29 (directed at heading off the recognition of same-sex marriages in our state), our statutes equate marriage with its legal status.
T113 I conclude, however, that there is ample justification to disregard comparisons between the "purport to marry" use of the term "marry" in the bigamy statute with other statutory provisions in which "marry," or its variations, is used to describe policy considerations which, although they relate to marriage, have nothing to do with polygamy. A consistent definition of any term throughout the expanse of the Utah Code might be a laudable objective, and one that is sometimes achieved. Definitions often, however, shift in keeping with the purpose and intent of the statute in which a term is deployed. The "simple grammatical extrapolation" used by the dissent to restrict culpability for "purporting to marry" to persons laying claim to a legal union is not as simple as the Chief Justice would have it be.
114 As a general proposition, the array of statutes that address marriage speak to the question of who can and who cannot enjoy the status of a legally recognized married person either by choice or, in the case of valid unsolemnized marriages, by operation of law. Utah Code Ann. § 30-1-4.5 (Supp. 2005). These statutes clearly have some relevance to the question of plural marriage, a relevance that appears in two ways. First, those statutes that define who may and who may not become lawfully married unequivocally place polygamists in the group that cannot claim legal legitimacy for additional unions, however formed, created while one of the parties is a spouse in a marriage recognized under Utah law. In addition, the unso-lemnized marriage statute, section 30-1-4.5, may assign legal status to one of a plural marriage participant's relationships and thereby expose the polygamist "husband" to prosecution for bigamy. Thus, in Green we affirmed the bigamy conviction of a defendant whose knowledge that he had a wife at the time he formed a spiritual union with another woman-knowledge that is a necessary element of bigamy-was founded on a judicial determination he had entered into a legal unsolemnized marriage. I do not share, however, the dissent's view that the statutory expression of public policy to "ree-ognize[ ] as marriage only the legal union of a man and woman" forecloses the use of the term "marry" to describe unions not entitled to legal recognition.
115 Our legislature has gone to considerable lengths to define who is eligible to be married and who is not. See Utah Const. art. I, § 29 (article I, section 29 provides legislative insight because, as a constitutional amendment, it traversed the legislature); Utah Code Ann. §§ 30-1-1 to -17.2 (1998). It has approached this task using marriage in a manner consistent with its overall objective of discriminating between who may be married and who may not. There is little in the provisions of Utah law relied on by the dissent to support its view that we should borrow our understanding of "marry" in the context of bigamy from its "legal" definition as used in Title 30 to define who is eligible to marry. There is a good reason for this. Describing the characteristics of those who may legally marry is a fundamentally different exercise from that of defining and proscribing polygamy. Rules that identify the characteristics of those deemed eligible to acquire the status of legal marriage need not necessarily be complementary to or symmetrical with definitions used to describe unions that the law proscribes as criminal. Both the statutes that define and regulate legal marriages and the statute that proscribes bigamy concern marriage, but the differing objectives of each make risky the interchange of concepts and definitions between the statutory provisions that relate to each.
I 116 The difficulty inherent in finding consistent language that applies coherently both to formulating legal marriages and to proscribing polygamous unions is evident in the approach the legislature has taken in constructing the Utah marriage chapter. The expression of public policy seized upon by the dissent to justify its conclusion that the definition of marriage is synonymous with legally recognized marriage takes on a different cast *755when it is considered in the context of the conceptual approach taken to marriage throughout chapter 1 of Title 80. If the legislature had structured the marriage provisions of this chapter in a manner consistent with its declaration of public policy, one would expect to find relationships that qualified as marriage on one side of the statutory ledger and those that were not marriage on the other. Instead, the legislature chose to assign the term "marriage" to every form of intimate relationship, be it incestuous, polygamous, involving a minor, or between persons of the same sex, and only then, after bestowing upon all of these relationships the label of "marriage," assigned to each the legal status of lawful, void, prohibited, or valid. Thus, when section 30-1-2 pronounces that "[the following marriages are prohibited and declared void," and then heads the roster of prohibited and void marriages with the circumstance "when there is a husband or wife living, from whom the person marrying has not been divorced," the limitations of the dissent's grammatical extrapolation become quite clear. The statute expressly labels the polygamous union a "marriage" and then describes the act of the polygamous partner who joins in that union as "marrying." This use of the terms "marriage" and "marry" could not conceivably have been intended to confer legal status on the unions enumerated in section 30-1-2. In fact, the intention was quite the opposite. Nevertheless, the statute unmistakably considers the unions that it rejected as prohibited and void as "marriages" created by the act of "marrying." I therefore conclude that the structure of our statutory treatment of "marriage" demands rather than forecloses an expansive definition of marriage.
T117 I am also unpersuaded by the dissent's attempt to bring the prohibition of polygamy imposed by our constitution into harmony with its statutory interpretation of "marry" by asserting that the "irrevocable ordinance," as article III, section 1 of the Utah Constitution is commonly known, was intended only to block legal recognition of plural marriages. The lead opinion ably makes the case that the framers of the Utah Constitution thought otherwise and intended to perpetuate criminal sanctions against practitioners of plural marriage. The Chief Justice advances a historical argument that the Enabling Act represented the last in a series of congressional measures commencing with the Morrill Act of 1862 that sought to prohibit the legal recognition of polygamous unions. This hypothesis does not properly account, in my view, for the incredulity that would have met such an interpretation in the Congress that enacted the Enabling Act. I believe that the historical record confirms that if, in fact, the drafters of Utah's proposed constitution had intended to interpret the irrevocable ordinance to ban only the legal recognition of polygamist unions, Utah's territorial status would have endured well into the twentieth century.
1118 For its part, Congress had shown little reservation against imposing criminal penalties on polygamists. See, eg., Ed-munds-FTucker Act, ch. 397, 24 Stat. 685 (1887); Edmunds Act, ch. 47, 22 Stat. 30 (1882); Morrill Act, ch. 126, 12 Stat. 501 (1862). In the Utah Territory, statehood proponents were certainly conscious of this when in 1887 they submitted a proposed constitution containing provisions declaring polygamy to be a misdemeanor, setting out penalties for violators, and removing the power of pardon for polygamy offenses from Utah officials. L. Rex Sears, Punishing the Saints for Their "Peculiar Institution": Congress on the Constitutional Dilemmas, 2001 Utah L.Rev. 581, 626 n. 814. This provision met with resistance from at least one senator who believed that the restriction on the power to pardon violated the equal-footing doctrine. Id. at 626 n. 316.1
1 119 By the time the Enabling Act passed Congress in 1894, LDS Church President Wilford Woodruff had issued the 1890 "Manifesto" renouncing Church sanction of polygamy, and a majority of the House Committee on the Territories was persuaded that the *756polygamy "problem" had been overcome. Id. at 627. Skepticism about polygamy's demise endured, however, resulting in the introduction of several anti-polygamy amendments to the Act. Among the objections that ultimately doomed proposals to require that the Utah Constitution expressly criminalize polygamy was the concern that congressional imposition of what amounted to a criminal statute forbidding polygamy would uniquely intrude on Utah's sovereignty and thereby unconstitutionally discriminate against the State in violation of the equal-footing doctrine. Id.
1120 The compromise language of the irrevocable ordinance that now appears as article III, section 1 of our constitution does not denominate polygamy as a crime, nor does it include a mandate that the legislature enact statutes imposing criminal penalties for its practice. The irrevocable ordinance is therefore susceptible to the interpretation espoused in the dissent: that it forbids only state endorsement of polygamy. It is not, however, an interpretation backed up by historical evidence sufficient to satisfactorily establish that Congress had been overcome by a theretofore unknown toleration for any form of polygamy. Even though the Manifesto and allied assurances made by statehood advocates about the elimination of the doctrine and practice of polygamy in Utah did much to mollify congressional suspicions about the enduring presence of plural marriage, there remained a clear congressional expectation that Utah's state legislature would view its duty under the irrevocable ordinance as requiring more than merely to check any impulse to extend legal validation to plural marriage.
{121 However one may evaluate the relative importance of the various rationales that contributed to the adoption of the text of the irrevocable ordinance, I am unable to accept the interpretation of the Chief Justice that it constituted congressional surrender to the authority of the LDS Church to preserve polygamy in its sacramental form while banning only recognition of plural marriages by civil authorities. Congress left little doubt about its expectation that the Utah Territory would not be welcomed into the Union without adequate assurances and evidence to support those assurances that polygamy had been banished. When the House Committee on the Territories issued its majority report endorsing the Enabling Act, it reflected its high expectations for the renunciation of plural marriage when it proclaimed "without doubt or hesitation that the institution of polygamy as taught by the Mormon Church, whether of faith or practice, is now absolutely stamped out and exterminated." Id. at 624 n. 308. This statement does not suggest that the Committee was merely concerned with the extermination of the threat that Utah would extend legal status to polygamous unions. Moreover, by the time Congress undertook an assault on the institution of the LDS Church by enacting the Ed-munds-Tucker Act in 1887, which, among an array of measures designed to bring polygamy to heel, disincorporated the Church, LDS Church leaders had abandoned claims to legal legitimacy for polygamous unions and retreated to the more defensible ground of asserting a spiritual mandate for them while disavowing any secular blessing on them. Id. at 625.
1122 By expressly noting that it was persuaded of the sincerity of LDS Church assurances that it had renounced polygamy in the realm of church as well as state, the Committee majority clearly signaled that it intended to condition Utah statehood on the abolition of polygamy in all of its forms and not merely on the promise of the state government that it would not confer legal status on polygamous unions. As the Chief Justice notes, there is evidence that the federal government softened its stance on prosecuting polygamists after the Manifesto was issued in 1890. It would be a mistake, however, to interpret a shift in law enforcement policy as evidence of a nascent tolerance of polygamy generally. 'To most, polygamy remained an evil to be eradicated. Rather, any relaxation of the federal government's zeal to prosecute polygamists is best explained by a willingness to tolerate pre-Manifesto polygamous unions in return for the assurance that no new polygamous unions would be countenanced. As explained by Senator Philander Knox, the irrevocable ordinance did not mandate "[the destruction of their existing families." Id. at 654 n. 490.
*7571123 The Chief Justice suggests further that the drafters of the Utah Constitution read into the absence of a prohibition against cohabitation in the irrevocable ordinance a belief that Congress had acquired a new-found acceptance of the living arrangements attendant to religiously sanctioned plural unions. While there is evidence that Utah officials were sensitive to a distinction between polygamy and polygamous cohabitation, there is no evidence in the debate over the content of the irrevocable ordinance that Congress intended to give its approval to polygamous cohabitation. On this point, it is telling that when Congress became aware that some in this state had taken the view that the federal government did not intend to proscribe polygamous cohabitation, it saw to it that the irrevocable ordinances included within the enabling acts for New Mexico and Arizona expressly prohibited polygamous cohabitation. Id. at 654 n. 491.
T 124 The effort to deny Reed Smoot, chosen to represent Utah in the United States Senate in 1902, his seat in that body lends further support to the view that Congress intended the Emabling Act and irrevocable ordinance to reach religious marriages as well as legally sanctioned unions. Mr. Smoot was a monogamist but served as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the LDS Church. Mr. Smoot's opponents based their objections to his eligibility to serve as a senator more on Smoot's LDS Church affiliation than his qualifications for office. The Quorum, together with the Church president and the president's two counselors, comprises the central ruling authority of the Church.
1 125 By 1904 when Church President Joseph F. Smith testified before the United States Senate in support of Mr. Smoot's effort to secure his senate seat, much of the congressional goodwill generated by hope that the Manifesto represented a sincere commitment by the LDS Church to sever all ties with the faith and practice of polygamy had dissipated in the face of strong evidence that Church officials continued to solemnize polygamous unions and evasive protestations of the Church to the contrary. Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Univ. N.C. Press 2004).
1126 Although Smoot ultimately took his seat in the Senate, the clear lesson to be drawn from the travail he endured before taking the oath of office was that congressional animus toward polygamy extended well beyond the realm of legal recognition for plural marriages in Utah.
T 127 Finally, my conviction that the State may, and in fact must, criminalize polygamy leads me to conclude that the Chief Justice's invocation of Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 123 S.Ct. 2472, 156 L.Ed.2d 508 (2003), is misplaced. I agree generally with the majority opinion's discussion of the inapplicability of Lawrence to polygamy and to legislative attempts to criminalize its practice. While I believe that the result in Lawrence can be reached by principled legal reasoning, that reasoning largely resides in the equal protection approach advanced by Justice O'Connor in her concurrence. Id. at 579, 123 S.Ct. 2472. By reaching the conclusion that sexual relations between consenting homosexual adults enjoy constitutional protection as a substantive liberty interest, the Lawrence majority exposed itself to Justice Sca-lia's apocalyptic rhetoric (although to be fair, Justice Sealia does not spare Justice O'Con-nor a ration of the same rhetoric) predicting the inevitable extension of constitutional protection to a multitude of cultural taboos, including polygamy, that have been targeted for criminal sanction. Id. at 586, 123 S.Ct. 2472. The Chief Justice's reliance on Lawrence appears to validate what would appear to most as Justice Scalia's far-fetched concerns.
1128 I believe that Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145, 25 L.Ed. 244 (1879), blocks any ambitions that Lawrence might have to seize polygamy and draw the practice of plural marriage within the protection of the Constitution. I am simply unable to extract from either the text or the context of Reynolds any evidence to support the Chief Justice's contention that we may sidestep its holding because it appears to us that polygamy no longer presents a social danger or that the Court's expression of belief that it posed such a danger in 1879 was merely an ill-*758informed and mean-spirited bias against the LDS Church.
{129 The precedent of Reynolds standing alone is sufficient to insulate Utah's bigamy statute from attack under the United States Constitution. I comment on the additional justifications advanced in the majority opinion for the statute's constitutionality only to note my view that they should not be read to suggest that the State has sweeping authority to regulate intimate personal relationships. Intimate personal relationships may indeed "serve as the building blocks of our society." It would be a mistake, however, to read into this observation any intention to enable the State to act as social engineer and architect, empowered to outlaw societal building blocks that do not conform to its preferred design or assembly. In this respect, polygamy and, since the adoption of article I, section 29, the Utah constitutional prohibition against legal unions between persons of the same gender, stand apart as realms in which the State may have sufficient justification to regulate intimate relationships. In neither of these instances, however, does that justification derive from the ability of the State to demonstrate that a compelling state interest is served by its intervention into intimate relationships. Rather, the authority of the State to erimi-nalize polygamy and to deny legal status to same gender unions is tied directly to constitutional grants of authority and, in the case of polygamy, United States Supreme Court precedent.
1130 I continue to be troubled by the concern that animated Chief Justice Durham's concurring opinion in Green over the potential use of Utah's unsolemnized marriage statute, section 30-1-4.5, to create a predicate for the bigamy prosecution of persons who seek no legal validation of a union based solely on a private pledge. Justice Durrant straddles this issue by, on the one hand, agreeing with the Chief Justice's statement that any two people may make private pledges that do not receive legal recognition as marriage while, on the other hand, noting the existence of the unsolemnized marriage statute and the existence of a substantial state interest in criminalizing unions when there is an "existing marriage," presumably including a marriage created by operation of the unsolemnized marriage statute. Because the existence of a solemnized marriage is undisputed here, it is entirely in order to straddle this question. I suspect, however, that at some point we will be called upon to confront this question and put both feet on one side or the other.

. A comprehensive and able account of the constitutional issues associated with the federal government's attempt to extirpate polygamy in the Utah Territory and those related to Utah's efforts to gain statehood, can be found in L. Rex Sears, Punishing the Saints for Their "Peculiar Institution": Congress on the Constitutional Dilemmas, 2001 Utah L.Rev. 581.