OCR Text |
Show COMMENTARIES. The News has undertaken to supplant Story as a commentator on the Constitution, Constitu-tion, but it succeeds very ill so far. To sustain its theory of privileges it supposes a case last night. It says, " suppose a State should be formed and admitted into the Union which legalized plural marriage." . The trouble with this is that it is all supposition, and supposes that made legal which is now a crime. A little lit-tle further on the new commentary says : " 'Mormon' plural marriage, as we have shown, is an ecclesiastical matter. It was not established by secular law, it did not ask the sanction of the secular law." This is true, and the fact therein stated is the very reason it ould not become a privilege as contemplated by the Constitution; Consti-tution; We cannot accept the News' theory the-ory as to what is true Democratic doctrine, doc-trine, while we are compelled to recognize recog-nize the doctrine of the Supreme Court as to the power of Congress to legislate for the Territories, and this power is absolute, ab-solute, if Congress chooses to so make it. That the regulation of family relations-properly relations-properly belongs to the local Legislature, we admit; but the local Legislature has been content to let the legal family be j the family of .the common law, and ! which. is, as the News knows, upon the monogamic system. The local Legislature Legisla-ture never legalized polygamous marriages, mar-riages, because "it was none of their business." Congress, however, made Biich marriages punishable, because it was the business of Congress. The Fourteenth Four-teenth Amendment does not apply, then, to the "privileges" of the Epistle and the elite, does it? "How's your liver?" - - |