Kody Brown and his four wives, the plaintiffs in this case, are stars of TLC's reality show Sister Wives [official website]. A police investigation [Utah News report] against them has been ongoing since September 2010, when the show was first announced and premiered. Utah's Anti-Bigamy Statute [statute, text] has been on the books since 1862. While polygamy is now recognized in most of Africa and the Middle East, it is still illegal in most of North and South America, Europe and China. In 2005, the US District Court for the District of Utah rejected a similar lawsuit [JURIST report] brought against Utah's Anti-Bigamy Statute, reaffirming the 1879 US Supreme Court case Reynolds v. United States [text], which upheld a conviction under an anti-polygamy law as constitutional.

Sgt. Calvin Gibbs was convicted of three counts [JURIST report] of premeditated murder in November and was sentenced to life in prison. Gibbs admitted that he cut off fingers from the bodies to keep as trophies but claimed he was acting in self-defense and that they had fired first. Specialist Jeremy Morlock had pleaded guilty [JURIST report] in March to the same premeditated murders and received a sentence of 24 years in prison. As part of his plea deal, Morlock agreed to testify against Gibbs and the rest of his co-defendants. Private Andrew Holmes pleaded guilty [JURIST report] to murder in September and was sentenced [JURIST report] to seven years in prison as part of a plea deal. A month earlier, Specialist Adam Winfield also pleaded guilty [JURIST report] to involuntary manslaughter in connection with the deaths, and was sentenced to three years in prison.

No private child-placing agency shall be required to consider or consent to any placement of a child for foster care or adoption when the proposed placement would conflict with the religious tenets of any sponsor of the agency or other organization or institution with which the child-placing agency is affiliated or associated. ... Refusal of a private child-placing agency to consider or consent to any placement of a child pursuant to this section shall not form the basis of any claim for damages.

Last month an Iowa court ruled that both same-sex parents' names must be recorded on birth certificates. In October the US Supreme Court [official website] denied certiorari [JURIST report] in Adar v. Smith [backgrounder], in which a same-sex couple asked Louisiana to include both of their names on the birth certificate of their adopted child. In April the Arkansas Supreme Court struck down [JURIST report] a state ban on adoptions by same-sex couples. The Supreme Court of Mexico in August 2010 upheld a Mexico City law [JURIST report] allowing adoptions by same-sex couples. Two years before that, a Florida court ruled that a state statute [JURIST report] preventing same-sex couples from adopting children was unconstitutional.

Scientology, founded by American science fiction author L Ron Hubbard in 1954, has also been challenged in Russia, which recently banned its main texts [JURIST report]. Prior to that, in 2009, Russia attempted to block Scientology from registering as a religion, which prompted the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) [official website] to condem the decision as discriminatory. That same year, Belgian prosecutor Jean-Claude Van Espen said Scientology should be classified as a criminal organization [JURIST report] after completing a 10-year investigation into the church's activities.