Media Matters for America reveals its response to Fox News’ Keith Ablow claim that “marriage died in 2013.”
Fox News’ resident anti-LGBT pop psychologist Keith Ablow boldly declared that “marriage died in 2013,” badly misreading a recent court decision in Utah to blame same-sex marriage supporters for turning marriage into the “the Wild West.”
In a December 31 column for FoxNews.com, Ablow congratulated himself for predicting that the legalization of same-sex marriage would result in the legalization of polygamous marriages, citing a recent decision by U.S. District Court Judge Clark Waddoups striking down part of Utah’s anti-polygamy statute. Marriage, Ablow argues, has become “the Wild West,” with incestuous marriages being the next frontier in the fight for marriage equality:
More than a year ago, when states began to legalize gay marriage, I argued that polygamy would be the natural result. If love between humans of legal age is the only condition required to have the state issue a marriage license, then it is irrational to assert that two men or two women can have such feelings for one another, while three women and a man, or two men and a woman, cannot.
[…]
Well, now U.S. District Court Judge Clark Waddoups has found parts of Utah’s anti-bigamy law unconstitutional. His ruling comes in a case brought by Kody Brown and his four wives, who are featured in the reality TV show, “Sister Wives.”
I believe the U.S. Supreme Court will uphold that finding, if Utah challenges it.
As I predicted, this will officially make marriage the Wild West, in which groups of people can assert that they are married and should have all the benefits of that status, including family health plans and the right to file taxes as married people.
It will also, eventually, lead to test cases in which a few unusual sisters and brothers insist that they can marry, because they are in love and promise not to procreate, but, instead, to use donor eggs or sperm.
[…]
Marriage is over.
It was always at least a little funny that a huge percentage of people swore to stay together until death, then divorced and remarried.
But, now, it is, officially, judicially, a joke.
If two men can marry, and three men can marry, and five women and a man can marry, and three men and two women can marry, then marriage has no meaning.
Like many right-wing commentators hoping to cite the Utah case as an example of the consequences of marriage equality, Ablow fails to mention that polygamous marriage is still illegal in Utah. Waddoups’ decision decriminalized polygamous relationships, but polygamists in Utah, as in the rest of the country, are still limited to one marriage license at a time. Waddoups’ decision cited a significant pro-gay Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, but it didn’t rely on court decisions legalizing same-sex marriage to conclude that polygamous families in Utah should be free to arrange their private personal relationships in whichever way they choose. In fact, the kind of cohabitation legalized in the Utah decision has been legal in most of the United States for many years.
Ablow’s gross misreading of Waddoups decision is just the latest in the Fox News expert’s history of peddling wild and baseless distortions about LGBT people and LGBT equality.
Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.
