Santorum's Slippery Slopes: One Down!

The Utah Supreme Court rejected a polygamist's arguments that his relationship with his second wife should be decriminalized. This insatiable lover--a Mormon, obviously--argued, in part, that his polygymist union deserves the same due process respect that gay persons now enjoy under the reasoning of the US Supreme Court's Lawrence decision.

In the Lawrence decision, Justice Kennedy wrote that private, consensual sexual acts were protected as fundamental liberty interests by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Here, Mr. Loverman argues that a similar liberty "shield" protected the relationship criminalized by the Utah statute. The Utah Court ruled that marriage, unlike private sex acts, was a "public institution," and thus explicity not covered by the language in Lawrence. And--oh, yeah--the second "wife" was only sixteen, which also put this case outside the scope of the Kennedy decision.

Actually, says the Utah Court, the holding of the Lawrence decision is much more narrow than its sweeping language would suggest, and has been limited to its precise holding affecting gay sodomy more than 40 times.

So, is this a good thing? It does not seem to me that, at least for the foreseeable future, Scalia's worries about this opinion leading inexorably to gay marriage by judicial fiat, à la Massachusetts. Should one argue for a more expansive reading of Lawrence--one that might allow marriage for both the man with his three financées as well as for the two womyn with their U-Haul? Is a reading that includes the latter, but excludes the former possible?