with the latest addtition to the family

SALT LAKE CITY (CN) – A challenge to Utah’s bigamy law made by the stars of television’s “Sister Wives” will move forward, a federal judge ruled, but it cannot target the governor or attorney general.

Kody Brown and his so-called sister wives – Meri, Janelle and Christine Brown, and Robyn Sullivan – filed a lawsuit against defendants Gov. Gary Herbert, Attorney General Mark Shurtleff and Utah County attorney Jeffrey Buhman in July 2011. The polygamous family claimed that Utah’s bigamy law violates the First and 14th Amendments.

Brown says he was “civilly married” to Meri Brown and “spiritually married” to the other three women.

Herbert, Shurtleff and Buhman moved to dismiss the Browns’ action for lack of standing, but U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups kept Buhman as the sole defendant last week.

The Brown family, which includes 16 children and stepchildren, fled from Utah to Nevada under fear of prosecution in January 2010. They want to return to the Beehive State, however, to rejoin relatives and the fundamentalist Apostolic United Brethren Church, a Mormon offshoot based in Salt Lake City, according to their complaint.

Prior to the 2010 launch of the TLC reality show “Sister Wives,” Shurtleff allegedly told the patriarch that he would not be criminally pursued if he went public with his lifestyle, so long as child brides, incest, and welfare or tax fraud were not at issue.

Source: Courthouse News Service.

Read more here:

http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/02/07/43708.htm