Should polygamist marriages be permitted?

Polygamy is defined as any form of marriage in which a person has more than one spouse and lives with those spouses. It also describes a man or a woman involved in sexual relationships with a number of different people at one time. I am not so concerned about the latter sexual relationships although there are purists who will object.

Polygyny (one man having multiple wives) is practiced in a traditional sense in many Middle East and African cultures and countries today, including South Africa and most of Southern and Central Africa and the Caribbean.

Polyandry is a practice where a woman marries more than one male simultaneously. Fraternal polyandry was traditionally practiced among nomadic Tibetans in Nepal and parts of China, in which two or more brothers share the same wife, with her having equal sexual access to them. Polyandry is believed to be more likely in societies with scarce environmental resources, as it is believed to limit human population growth and enhance child survival. A woman can only have so many children in her lifetime, no matter how many husbands she has. On the other hand, a child with many ‘fathers’, all of whom provide resources, is more likely to survive.

Group marriage may exist in a number of forms, such as where more than one man and more than one woman form a single family unit, and all members of the marriage share parental responsibility for any children arising from the marriage.

Bigamy is when one individual is married to two people at the same time and at least one of the marriages is a legal marriage. Most western countries have laws making any second marriage a crime. For example, because of the contract a married person makes upon becoming married, that person is under obligation not to marry again as long as the first marriage continues; with stipulations of the marriage license applying. To do otherwise is against the law. There have been exceptions where one spouse had been presumed dead and the other had remarried without realizing that her first spouse was still alive.

What this piece is about is polygamists who marry more than one spouse and all the spouses and their children live together as a family unit. An example of this is what has recently been happening in Texas. The Eldorado ranch complex of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is a polygamy sect. To say that they are Mormons is not true because Mormons outlawed polygamy in the nineteenth century. These polygamists at the Eldorado ranch were marrying off girls as young as 13 to much older men who had multiple wives. The reason why this is gross is not because old men are marring young women. There are thousands of December/May marriages worldwide and they are quite legal. What makes what was happening at the Eldorado ranch so gross was because older men were marrying girls as young as thirteen. What made it even grosser was that these old men were then having sex with these children and making them pregnant. That is illegal in Western countries. In the state of Utah, there was the conviction of the sect's leader, Warren Jeffs, who was an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl, whom he had forced to marry an 18-year-old man against her wishes. The Texas raid brought about the seizure of more than 400 children in which a number of them are pregnant.

This sect has split from the mainstream Church of Latter-Day Saints because it believes every subsequent law or court ruling on polygamy violates the U.S. First Amendment of the Constitution that protects the free exercise of belief. That doesn’t make sense at all. Suppose it was their belief that they could conduct human sacrifices, would they be protected by the Constitution because they have the right to exercise their beliefs in a situation like that? I think not.

What is left is a criminal prosecution as the best option ---- but why has it taken so long for that sect's practices to be brought before a judge? In the first place, the government was well aware of what was going on at that ranch. The government officials rhetorically sat on their asses and did nothing; that is until they received a phone call from someone who said she was 16 years of age and was being forced to marry a man who was much older than she was. As it turned out, the call was made by a thirty-year-old woman who was not being forced to marry an older man and she didn’t even live at the ranch. You can trust the Americans to look before they leap. The Iraq fiasco is an example of this. President Bush invaded Iraq because he believed that there were weapons of mass destruction being built by Saddam. It turned out that there were no such weapons in Iraq. It also turned out that no 16-year-old girl in the ranch called saying that she was being forced to marry an old man.

Canada has a similar situation happening in British Columbia. There is a notorious offshoot of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints living at a community of their own they call Bountiful. B.C.'s attorney general, Oppal is under the gun to take similar action on Bountiful.

It seems so simple: the church practices institutionalized child abuse that's handed down as Scripture. It's intolerable. But what's strange and terrible about Oppal's choices is in reality a grey, muddy mess. The reason for this is definitely a constitutional issue in Canada but not for religious reasons or having anything whatever to do with one’s belief.

Recently the issue of men from Saudi Arabia immigrating to Canada with more than one wife and being permitted to keep their wives when they land on our shores; has come to our attention. That is because in Saudi Arabia, polygyny is permitted. It appears that Canada’s official view is that if it’s legal in one country, it is not up to Canadian authorities to say that it shouldn’t be legal in our country.

Hundreds of Greater Toronto Area Muslim men in polygamous marriages ---- some with a harem of wives ---- are receiving welfare and social benefits for each of their spouses, thanks to the city and the province of Ontario. Perhaps when they were in Saudi Arabia, they could afford to keep four wives and support the many children that they brought into this world as a result of the relationships they had with their wives, but it doesn’t mean that they could do the same here in Canada and if they can’t, then we as Canadians as taxpayers will have to support the man’s wives and children.

Mumtaz Ali, president of the Canadian Society of Muslims, said that wives in polygamous marriages are recognized as spouses under the Ontario Family Law Act, providing they were legally married under Muslim laws abroad. Obviously Ontario recognizes religious marriages for Muslims and others where men are married to more than one wife and sharing their lives with them.

We as Canadians, who believe in the sanctity of marriage to one spouse at any one time, also recognize the inequality that faces women who are part of a man’s harem. The right of women and children to be free from the various forms of discrimination that polygyny perpetuates should be given a similar level of protection under Canada's Charter ‘equality and security of the person’ provisions that it would receive under the Women's and Children's Conventions. At the very least, children of polygyny marriages should not have pressure exerted on them to marry within the sect if they aren’t in love with the man they are to marry. Unfortunately, this pressure is exerted on them because if they marry outside the sect, eventually, the sect will be reduced in size until it no longer exists.

The Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs has publicly noted that the human rights of women remain a central foreign policy priority for Canada, both in bilateral discussions and in multilateral forums. In this sense, when Canada fails to address the domestic human rights violations of women through practices such as polygyny, its foreign policy legitimacy is undermined and certainly permitting men from Saudi Arabia to immigrate to Canada with a harem of wives undermines our own concept of what is fair. For example, is it fair to say that a man who has more than one wife but never lived anywhere but Canada, cannot live in such a relationship when men from outside of Canada, come to Canada as immigrants and continue to live as polygamists in Canada? Such a Canadian could raise a constitutional argument that he is not being treated equally.

The foremost problem is the fact polygamy may be a crime, but it's very hard to prosecute on its own because it butts up against freedom of religion. In Canada, the attorney general of B.C. is in an untenable position - he's worried from what he recognized in the past that anti-polygamy laws might not stand a constitutional challenge on religious grounds and was reluctant to test them in front of the B.C. Court of Appeals.

It's an environment that doesn't lend itself well to ready witnesses or even complainants willing to bring charges; indeed, there are Internet reports that the anonymous call that sparked the Texas raid may have been made by someone outside the FLDS ranch. Texas prosecutors are finding it nearly impossible just to find the names and parents of the children they've seized; constructing a case against the FLDS will be a nightmare.

Those prosecutors are also being haunted by the past because this has been tried before: in 1953, U.S. and Canada conducted a simultaneous series of raids against polygamists. In the states, the incident ---- dubbed the Short Creek raid, for the Arizona town where the sect then lived, prompted a massive media outcry from the sight of happy, playing children being ripped from their mothers' arms and led to the fall of the governor of the state. According to the Vancouver Sun, in Canada, the children who were seized in a community not far from Bountiful ended up in residential schools ---- and eventually in 2004, B.C. Attorney General Geoff Plant later apologized for that raid. We also remember the aboriginal children being ripped from their parents and placed in Indian residential schools around Canada and the Freedomite children also being ripped from their parents and placed in a residential school in B.C. The Canadian government and the churches have repeatedly recognized that this was wrong.

The raids solidified the sect’s teachings among its followers that their government is persecuting them and reinforced the fear of the sect's children and mothers that going to the authorities means the breakup of their families. It also brings up a practical problem ---- what to do with the children this time? In B.C.'s case, can the Ministry of Children and Family Development really handle children who have been taught that leaving their church will put them into a world of evil and condemn them to hell?

Those are all questions the attorney general will have to deal with and he's promised to make a decision soon. His choices are stark. He can attempt a shaky prosecution that, if it fails, may allow the sect to flourish stronger than ever for another half a century. Or he can do nothing, be cast as a tacit supporter of child abuse and allow B.C. to continue to be a refuge to polygamists.

The first way to solve this problem is to not permit men with more than one wife to immigrate to Canada. Polygamy is illegal in this country and to permit polygamists to immigrate to Canada will simply created a horrific constitutional mess that we may never resolve. With respect to those who have been accepted in our country, there isn’t much we can do about it. However, let's put an end to this problem once and for all and stop all polygamist marriages from ever recurring anymore.