One wife is plenty
 
By Iain Hunter
The Victoria Times-Colonist
 
As someone who's had wives in succession, with qualified success, I have no interest in polygamy.

Marriage is not something to be taken lightly, especially after children are produced. A loving relationship with one person, with all its ups and downs, is a wonderful thing.

But I suppose there are men who have a hankering for a clutch of wives, especially young, pretty and healthy ones, and who think it would be kind of neat to have 100 or so kids if they could afford them.

And I suppose there are women who could share a husband with other women and not be consumed with jealousy on their own or their children's account. If there are men who like the idea of sharing a wife with another man, I haven't met them.

We've been made aware for some time of the existence in British Columbia of a community known as Bountiful, where about 1,500 members of a fundamentalist Mormon splinter group are living what the law says is a life of crime.

Males in the community are encouraged to take many wives. Winston Blackmore, one of its leaders, is reported to have at least 26 wives and 100 kids.

The sect claims religious authority for this helter-skelter approach to marriage and conception.

It believes that men must marry multiple wives in order to get to heaven; women are bidden by their faith to help them get there.

So far this sounds relatively harmless, if bizarre to most, even though it violates the Criminal Code's prohibition of polygamy.

But that's not all that's at stake here. Some of the wives taken by those who, appropriately enough, are called elders are, or have been, as young as 13 and 14. Some of them might, or might not, know what they're getting into; authorities suspect their religious instruction on this aspect of their lives amounts to brainwashing.

We don't know the details of courtship in the community. It could be that young girls are being traded like chattels to satisfy the passion, perhaps not entirely religious, of older men.

And we don't know how these handmaidens of a God that may be unfamiliar to us are treated. We don't know what their faith allows them to suffer.

For these reasons I have less concern about violation of the law against polygamy than I have with the possibility, or likelihood, that far more serious crimes are being committed: Rape, sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, human trafficking -- and involving young women or girls below what our society has deemed to be the age of consent.

Polygamy has been a crime in Canada since 1890, but has been prosecuted rarely. Prosecution has been considered almost too risky since 1982 when the Charter of Rights and Freedoms declared what is acceptable in our free and democratic society and invited the courts to build on it despite the will, or lack of it, of Parliament and the legislatures to handle sticky issues.

In 1990, the B.C. government decided not to prosecute polygamy because it feared the law might be judged unconstitutional. Since then Bountiful has flourished within the reach of the law.

It's said that getting a conviction on the more serious offences that polygamy is suspected of allowing is difficult because those women suspected to be suffering abuse are unwilling to testify truthfully -- that they have been brainwashed.

But if someone under the age of 14 couldn't consent to sexual union legally -- or under 16 as of this summer -- what would be the point of putting them through testifying? Wouldn't establishing their age and their cohabitation be enough? Is the law that blind?

B.C. Attorney General Wally Oppal has indicated he will do an end run around Bountiful by asking the B.C. Court of Appeal to say whether the anti-polygamy law is constitutional.

This question probably will end up in the Supreme Court of Canada; the federal government might be persuaded to send it there directly. In any case, an issue that's been clouded since the charter became the supreme law of the land should soon be clear.

And if the courts find that there's nothing constitutionally wrong with multiple marriage -- quite apart from other crimes that may be committed under its guise -- what then?

Would it be so terrible if the fundamentalist Mormons and the far greater number of Muslims who see it as a religious right continue to practise polygamy? If people can marry partners of either sex, why shouldn't they marry as many as they want?

If, as the Ontario Court of Appeal has declared, a child can have three parents, why not more?

If procreation is accepted as the main reason for people marrying, polygamy makes far more sense than homosexual marriage.

But please, let's not make it compulsory. One wife at a time is about all most of us can handle.

Iain Hunter is a columnist with the Victoria Times-Colonist.
 
canada.com
Originally published Wednesday, September 5, 2007
 
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