‘Emerging Awareness’ Update: Remember the Texas Polygamy Teen Sex Cult?

Posted on | December 14, 2013 | 15 Comments

You have perhaps forgotten the 2008 “underage sex cult” case in which Texas authorities seized 416 children at the Laredo compound of the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). Facts I noted at the time were that (a) Texas led the nation in teen pregnacy, and (b) in 2005 Texas raised the legal age for marriage from 14 to 16, specifically because FLDS moved to Texas.

(Of course, every enlightened liberal believes society should be hostile toward groups with high teen pregnancy rates, right?)

There were layers of irony in Texas officials raiding the FLDS and seizing hundreds of children because — shockingly! — some of these teenagers were having sex and even giving birth, as if fundamentalist Mormon girls were the only teen mothers in Texas.

Once a society discards its own cultural traditions and abandons constitutional principles, the ultimate results are not “freedom,” “equality” and “social justice” but rather anarchy, conflict and decadence. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s “emerging awareness” doctrine, manufactured in order to abolish the Texas sodomy law in 2003, has had both intended and unintended consequences. Gosh, it seems like only yesterday, but it was in 2003, that Justice Antonin Scalia wrote this in his dissent:

 Countless judicial decisions and legislative enactments have relied on the ancient proposition that a governing majority’s belief that certain sexual behavior is “immoral and unacceptable” constitutes a rational basis for regulation. . . . State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding. See ante, at 11 (noting “an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex” (emphasis added)). The impossibility of distinguishing homosexuality from other traditional “morals” offenses is precisely why Bowers rejected the rational-basis challenge.

Thus the question I have repeatedly asked: Who knows whither the “emerging awareness” shall henceforth emerge?

Gosh, you just never know what might happen next.

Federal Court Strikes Down
Criminalization of Polygamy In Utah
— Jonathan Turley

Federal court strikes down
portion of Utah’s polygamy law
— Hot Air

Federal Court Narrows Utah Bigamy Law
— National Review

Oh, so polygamy — the practice of which caused Texas to raise its age of consent from 14 to 16 in 2005 — has now been recognized as a constitutional right by a federal court? Do we suppose that lawyers for FLDS will ignore the possible implications of this precedent?

“Next stop on the slippery slope express, I assume, will be consensual adult incest marriages,” says Professor Bainbridge, but you just never know. The emerging awareness is so tricky to predict. Perhaps they’ll legalize lesbian pagan child brides next . . .