- cross-posted to:
- seattle@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- seattle@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/66759116
A unanimous vote among the three members of the Seattle City Council’s Housing, Arts and Civil Rights Committee forwarded a proposal to the full council that would amend sections of the Seattle Municipal Code to “recognize genders outside the gender binary, recognize pansexuality and asexuality as orientations, and include consensual relationships with multiple partners as an element of attitudes, preferences, and practices pertaining to sexual orientation.”
The protections would apply to employment, housing, business licensure, places of public accommodation, park usage, and “bias-free policing,” according to the proposal.
Seattle would follow Portland, West Hollywood, Berkeley, California, and a handful of other cities in adopting the expanded protections against discrimination. Under the bill, residents facing unfair treatment could file complaints and seek remedy through Seattle’s Office for Civil Rights.
the laws banning poly-marriage, as I understand, were largely targeted at Mormons, and in the context of a cult, I can see how that would be a reasonable restriction
@arctanthrope Pretty sure monogamy rules in France target specific groups, but…
How is a law system that target a specific minorised culture or group of people, instead of a proven harm, be reasonable ?
The social “harm,” in the case of the Mormons, was that Brigham Young declared polygamy a requirement for going to heaven, which meant that every man needed at least two wives. Older and more established “patriarchs” would marry anyone from literal children to widows and divorcees. This led to some dubious practices for “acquiring wives” since the population can only support so many one-to-many marriages. Additionally, the Church originally would only sanction marriages within the Church, so you’d have to find not one, but multiple women of your own localized cult to marry. Divorce among Mormons during this time was actually common (which probably didn’t help their case with the other Christians back east who deemed divorce a social problem).
The scale of polygamy in Utah during that time was staggering and Brigham Young had around 56 wives (the number is disputed and changes depending on the source and the criteria). Naturally, this formal, institutionalized approach to polygamy created an environment where abuse was rampant. Anna Eliza Young, one of Brigham’s 56 wives, even sued him for neglect and abuse after they divorced. She was then excommunicated from the LDS church after divorcing him.
But the real reason Mormon polygamy was soecifixally outlawed was because Brigham Young was an autocrat and was well on his way to building a rival country in Utah. The US obviously wanted Utah to remain a territory, but the Mormons were pushing for the creation of their Zion (the Biblical refuge from persecution and wandering, similar to but not the same as the state of Israel; this ventures off deep into Mormon theology territory and it’s best not to go there). The US civil war was also going on and the Union figured that a territory going rogue and establishing a new landlocked country wasn’t ideal. So even though Mormon polygamy became federally prohibited it wasn’t enforced until Utah petitioned to become a US state.
All of this to say that, historically, the anti-Mormon and anti-polygamy laws in the US require a bit of context to unpack. In general, the US should probably relax its legal position on bigamy and polygamy, but in the end, as another poster pointed out, polygamy makes property claims and inheritance more legally complicated (especially when crossing state lines as is often the case in bigamy). Social attitudes still have a ways to go before anyone will bother with reversing the various anti-polygamy laws from the 19th century.