Abstract
President Abraham Lincoln purportedly responded to a group of Congressmen eager to step up the early campaign against polygamy with an anecdote about an old log on his boyhood farm: "It was too heavy to move, too hard to chop, and to green to burn. So we just plowed around it." Curiously enough, the State of Utah has tacitly adopted Lincoln's policy toward polygamy 130 years later, as polygamy prosecutions have ceased. At the same time, polygamists find themselves the beneficiaries of a greater tolerance toward the family law rights of persons engaging in other alternative lifestyles and the Utah courts' firm commitment to emphasizing the interests of children implicated in custody and adoption proceedings. Sanderson and W.A.T. may represent something of a fortuitous windfall for polygamists because the cases focus more on their children's interests than their own, but what is certain is that with a sizeable polygamous population, no enforced criminal restrictions against polygamy, and a more expansive judicial attitude toward the ancillary family interests of polygamists and their children, the way is paved for new developments in a saga as old as Utah itself.
Recommended Citation
Otto, R. Michael
(1991)
""Wait Til Your Mothers Get Home": Assessing the Rights of Polygamists as Custodial and Adoptive Parents,"
Utah Law Review: Vol. 1990:
No.
4, Article 5.
Available at:
https://dc.law.utah.edu/ulr/vol1990/iss4/5