‘Sister Wives’ Family Loses, Appeals Court Tosses Brown’s Polygamay Lawsuit

The Sister Wives family was dealt a serious blow on Monday, when a federal appeals court dismissed their lawsuit challenging Utah polygamy laws. It was the biggest legal defeat so far for the Sister Wives family following their lawsuit against the State of Utah.

According to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, Kody Brown and his sister wives cannot sue the state to challenge its ban on polygamy, which is written into the Utah state Constitution, because his family was never charged for violating the state’s polygamy law. In addition, the State of Utah had already announced that consenting adults would not be prosecuted for polygamy alone.

As ABC News reported, the most recent Sister Wives ruling is a complete reversal of a 2013 ruling that lifted the threat of arrest for Browns and the rest of the polygamist families in the State of Utah. In 2013, U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups ruled in favor of the Sister Wives clan, finding that Sister Wives family was driven from Utah to Las Vegas as a result of the threat of persecution based upon Utah’s bigamy laws. According to the District Judge, “key parts” of Utah’s bigamy laws violate both privacy and religious freedom rights.

In the wake of the 2013 Sister Wives ruling, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes filed an appeal. According to state leadership, the State of Utah has had a longtime policy against prosecuting “consenting adult polygamists.” Despite that “longstanding policy,” the State of Utah has argued that the polygamy ban should remain on the books to help legal authorities more easily pursue polygamists who commit other crimes. Included among the other crimes that the State of Utah has been concerned with in association with polygamy are sexual assault, spousal and child abuse, statutory rape, and fraud related to government benefits, such as food stamps.

During the Sister Wives appeal, the State of Utah pointed to the case of Warren Jeffs, the FLDS leader convicted of multiple crimes in relation to his religious cult’s practice of polygamy, including assaulting the young girls he considered his “spiritual wives.”

The Sister Wives family argued that the State of Utah already has plenty of laws on the books to ensure that they can effectively prosecute crimes associated with polygamy that fall outside of the plural marriages themselves. The Brown family and the sister wives who make up the majority of the adults involved also argued that laws against polygamy can “sow distrust of authority.” According to the Browns, their show Sister Wives provides evidence that polygamous marriages can be “just as healthy” as traditional monogamous marriages.

Since the 2013 ruling in favor of the Sister Wives family, the State of Utah has continued to outlaw bigamy, which is defined as the holding of multiple, state-sanctioned, legal marriage license; the Sister Wives family has only one legally sanctioned marriage. Currently, Kody Brown is legally married to his fourth and most recent wife, Robyn, reports Us Weekly. The Sister Wives patriarch recently divorced his first and only previous legal wife, Meri, and remarried his youngest and newest wife so that Robyn’s biological children could be legally adopted into the Sister Wives clan.

In polygamists marriages in the State of Utah, only the first marriage is legally recognized by the state. Subsequent marriages are referred to as “spiritual marriages,” performed by religious leaders and not legally recognized by the state.

In addition to the Sister Wives’ Browns, there are roughly 30,000 known polygamist families in the state of Utah, according to court records. Many polygamist families are members of the FLDS church or Mormon offshoot cults and believe that multiple wives will result in exaltation in heaven. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church, had up to 40 wives, the New York Times reports. His youngest wife was a 14-year-old child, and many members of the FLDS church carry on the tradition of the “Principle of Plural Marriage” by marrying young girls in the manner of the Mormon church’s founder and/or the current “prophet” of the FLDS church, Warren Jeffs.

The Sister Wives family’s marriages have all involved consenting adult wives. The modern Mormon church abandoned the practice of polygamy in 1890 as part of the federal government’s demands as Utah (then Deseret) strove for statehood. According to the modern Mormon church, the abandonment of plural marriage was the result of “divine revelation.”

Neither the Sister Wives family nor the Utah attorney general have commented on Monday’s ruling.

[Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images]