Marriage by the numbers
 Some Canadians fear legalizing same-sex marriage will lead to court challenges over polygamy. The practice of men taking multiple wives has ancient roots in several faiths.
 
By Ron Csillag
The Toronto Star
 
If the federal Liberals had wanted to avoid tumbling on the slippery slope they insist doesn't link same-sex marriage to polygamy, they would have done well to heed Pierre Trudeau's maxim that the essential ingredient of politics is timing.

Coincidentally, it was also the late prime minister who said there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.

But in announcing an urgent study last month into the legal and social ramifications of polygamy, just as the same sex controversy continued to boil, the government could not but create the impression the two are related.

"We don't see any connection, I repeat, any connection between the issue of polygamy and the issue of same-sex marriage," justice minister Irwin Cotler told reporters. Cotler also noted that several Canadian courts have ruled the traditional definition of marriage as between one man and one woman is unconstitutional, but that having more than one spouse is a crime.

Still, critics mused that the so-called floodgates fear spooked Prime Minister Paul Martin into ordering the study, one they say reflects a deep-seated fear that legalized homosexual marriage could lead to court challenges from groups claiming polygamy (and other fringe practices) as a religious right.

"If I was a lawyer defending polygamists, I'd say `This is a constitutional right, a freedom of religion,'" said Conservative party justice critic Vic Toews.

The Liberals insisted the polygamy study was ordered at the request of British Columbia, which is probing complaints of the practice at the religious commune of Bountiful, near the B.C. interior town of Creston.

Bountiful was quietly set up in 1947 after a few men excommunicated by the mainstream Mormon Church in Utah moved north. Today the 1,000-odd residents are said to be the offspring of six men.

Last August, three months after after nine women fugitives from Bountiful filed a complaint with B.C.'s attorney general alleging sexual abuse of girls as young as 13, the RCMP announced a probe of the commune.

Why did it take so long? Some say it's because authorities have feared the religion card.

In 1992, police recommended two Bountiful men be charged with polygamy. But the Crown attorney's office declined to do so, following legal advice that conviction was impossible because freedom of religion guarantees in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms would trump the Criminal Code section on polygamy.

Bigamy, officials further reasoned, is prosecuted because it has fraudulent intent, but parties tend to consent to polygamy, usually for religious reasons.

Those reasons have nothing to do with Mormonism today, stresses David Murray of the 150,000-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Canada.

Murray says the mainstream Mormon church headquartered in Utah renounced and outlawed polygamy in 1890, and that opponents of the practice used it to delay Utah's statehood until 1896.

"Anybody who's been practising it since is subject to the harshest action the church can impose, and that's removal of membership. ... We strongly disapprove of the practice today," Murray says unequivocally. "It's part of our past."

Indeed, polygamy — or more correctly, polygyny, the marriage of more than one woman to the same man — was an important part of the teachings of the church. Called plural marriage, it began during the lifetime of the church's founder, Joseph Smith, and became widespread during the time of his successor, Brigham Young.

But is Bountiful Mormon? The commune says it is part of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which claims 30,000 members. Based in Utah, the group is described variously (and innaccurately, lament mainline Mormons) as a breakaway, dissenting or fundamentalist Mormon sect that teaches that men must have three or more wives and as many children as possible to enter heaven.

Bountiful's leader, Winston Blackmore, 44, is purported to have 30 wives and 80 children. He did not return the Star's calls.

Said the Canadian church's Murray: "We try to co-exist in the spirit of kindness. But they refer to themselves incorrectly as Latter-day Saints."

Early Mormons would have searched the Bible in vain for justification for polygamy because there isn't any, says Victor Shepherd, professor of theology at Toronto's Tyndale University College & Seminary.

"There's no text in scripture that commands it, none that defends it and none to recommend it," Shepherd says flatly. "And there's no evidence the Christian church ever recommended it, defended it or countenanced it."

In at least two places in the Gospels, Jesus, harking to the book of Genesis, says that whoever shall "put away" his wife and marry another commits adultery.

The catechism of the Catholic Church leaves no doubt. Under the heading of "Other offences against the dignity of marriage," it states that polygamy "is not in accord with the moral law."

Yet, during the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther advised his main supporter, Philip of Hesse, that although he found nothing unbiblical about polygamy, Hesse should keep his second marriage secret to avoid public scandal.

And the Old Testament is rife with polygamy among the biblical patriarchs. Later, Kings David and Solomon had legions of wives and concubines. But their ultimate downfall, say sages, is found in the Torah's prohibition against kings having multiple wives.

As well, says Shepherd, regal polygamy brought trouble because these women were foreigners who introduced the Israelites to idolatry.

Nevertheless, polygamy in biblical times was "very prevalent and the accepted norm, both morally and spiritually," says Toronto Rabbi Yehiel Ben Ayon. Biblical law "completely condones a man being wed to more than one wife at the same time."

Around 1000 A.D., the great Rabbi Gershom of Germany banned the practice. Then, as now, monogamy was seen "as a concession to the times," Ben Ayon says.

But Gershom's edict didn't take everywhere. Sephardic Jews in North Africa and Spain, where Islamic influence was strong, continued the practice to the point where Israel had to make provisions for polygamic Jewish families to immigrate, and be recognized as valid, after its 1948 creation.

Islam allows a man to have up to four wives at once, but today, this "is very, very rare," says Imam Husain Patel of the Islamic Foundation of Toronto.

Patel says Islam helped to "regulate and restrict" rampant polygamy among tribal Arabs at the time of Mohammed, who, at one point, had nine wives, all but one of them widows or divorcees.

Islamic polygamy owes its origins to a verse in the Qur'an that advises if a man cannot deal fairly with orphans (meaning fatherless minors), he may marry their mothers, "two, three or four of them."

But it adds that if a man cannot deal equitably with his wives, to marry just one. The verse "doesn't promote polygamy, but allows it," Patel says.

Other Muslim sources say polygamy is sanctioned only in exceptional circumstances, such as when there is a shortage of male adults after a war, and that monogamy is generally preferable.

But "sometimes polygamy becomes a necessity ... if a woman cannot produce children or satisfy a man's sexual needs, the solution in the West is divorce," Patel says.

"If we allow polygamy and regulate it and whoever has the means to support it, it's healthy, pragmatic and religiously acceptable, and should be socially acceptable."

Lawyer Peter Hogg, who argued the federal government's case for same-sex marriage at the Supreme Court of Canada, says he doubts that a religious claim to polygamy would succeed.

"It would bump into some very strong public policy, including respecting the rights of women. I would be surprised if a court would accept it."

The only circumstance in which he sees polygamy permitted is "some kind of cataclysmic reduction in the male population."

Ron Csillag is a Toronto writer who specializes in religion. He may be reached at csillag@ rogers.com.
 
thestar.com
Originally published February 5, 2005
 
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