Polygamy should never be legalized

Are unmarried people living together as a group where one of the members of the group is of the opposite sex of the other members, a form of polygamy? In other words, if a man lives with three women and has sex with them and yet, they are unmarried, are they living the lives of polygamists? I don’t think so.

Here's what the Canadian Criminal Code says about polygamy:

(1) Everyone who: (a) practices or enters into or in any manner agrees or consents to practice or enter into (i) any form of polygamy, or (ii) any kind of conjugal union with more than one person at the same time, whether or not it is by law recognized as a binding form of marriage, or (b) celebrates, assists or is a party to a rite, ceremony, contract or consent that purports to sanction a relationship mentioned in subparagraph (a)(i) or (ii), is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.

There obviously has to be some form of contract or ceremony involved before the act of living together as man and wife commits the offence of polygamy. But what about unmarried people living together as a single unit? What is ‘any kind’ of conjugal union? On this point, the criminal law is silent. In family law, the definition of conjugal union used to include things such as the sharing of meals, sexual exchange, watching TV together and the delivery or sharing of domestic services.

‘Conjugal union’ means a marriage, common law marriage, intimate partnership, or any other ‘living together-like relationship’. As an example; in a three person situation, people living in such a Conjugal Union could be as a group (persons A, B, and C) and as such, they are in a Conjugal Union with each other.

In today’s society, is that illegal? Not really. Polyamory is the practice, desire, or acceptance of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved. There is currently no legal or psychological definition of polyamory. In fact, years ago when a large group of people were caught having sex together and charged, the Supreme Court of Canada stated that what they were doing wasn’t illegal. The late Pierre Trudeau, prime minister of Canada stated that the government had no business in the bedrooms of its citizens.

The polygamists in Canada want Canada's 120-year-old anti-polygamy laws struck down.

The 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act, which effectively disestablished the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints until that entity gave up its doctrine of polygamy, was a harsh law. The Mormons were effectively declared an organized-crime outfit: their properties were confiscated, and their leaders were driven underground. It took three years, but in 1890 they abandoned polygamy, Utah became a state, and the Mormons have been patriotic and valuable Americans ever since.

If polygamy were legalized, I think the type of group marriage that many people envision would remain extremely rare because it just seems to go against human nature. This would bring out the problem of one man, many wives form of marriages and this would have a negative impact on society because it would mean that there wouldn't be enough women to go around for all the men who want to marry them.

Do you know what is said about a man who marries more than one woman and isn’t divorced? If he marries two of them, he is a bigamist and if he marries three or more of them, he is a pigamist. As far as I am concerned, a man who marries many young women in a village or small community is a pig because in doing so, he denies young men in the village or community from marrying young women they may be in love with. Their loss comes about because some old fart wants them for himself.

Other things being equal (and, to a good first approximation, they are), when one man marries two women, some other man ends up marrying no woman. When one man marries three women, two other men don't marry. When one man marries four women, three other men don't marry. Monogamy gives everyone a shot at marriage. Polygamy, by contrast, is a zero-sum game that skews the marriage market so that some men marry at the expense of others.

For the individuals affected, losing the opportunity to marry is a grave, even devastating, deprivation. But the effects are still worse at the social level. Sexual imbalance in the marriage market has bad social consequences and many grim ones at that.

Two political scientists, Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer, pondered those consequences in their 2004 book Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population. Summarizing their findings in a Washington Post article, they wrote: "Scarcity of women leads to a situation in which men with advantages — money, skills, education — will marry, but men without such advantages — poor, unskilled, illiterate — will not. A permanent subclass of bare branches (unmarriageable men) from the lowest socioeconomic classes is created.” unquote

In China and India, for example, by the year 2020 ‘bare branches’ will make up 12 to 15 percent of the young adult male population."

The problem in China and India is sex-selective abortion (and sometimes infanticide), not polygamy; where the marriage market is concerned, however, the two are functional equivalents. In their book, Hudson and den Boer note that "bare branches are more likely than other males to turn to vice and violence." To get ahead, they "may turn to appropriation of resources, using force if necessary." Such men are ripe for recruitment by gangs, and in groups they "exhibit even more exaggerated risky and violent behavior." The result is "a significant increase in societal, and possibly inter-societal, violence."

Their conclusions make sense when you consider that crime rates, according to the authors, tend to be higher in polygynous societies. Worse, "high-sex-ratio societies are governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing violence at home and exporting it abroad through colonization or war."

In medieval Portugal, "the regime would send bare branches on foreign adventures of conquest and colonization." (An equivalent today may be jihad.) In 19th-century China, where as many as 25 percent of men were unable to marry, "these young men became natural recruits for bandit gangs and local militia," which nearly toppled the government. In what is now Taiwan, unattached males fomented regular revolts and became entrepreneurs of violence.

Hudson and den Boer suggest that societies become inherently unstable when sex ratios reach something like 120 males to 100 females: in other words, when one-sixth of men are surplus goods on the marriage market. The United States as a whole would reach that ratio if, for example, 5 percent of men took two wives, 3 percent took three wives, and 2 percent took four wives — numbers that are quite imaginable, if polygamy were legal for a while. In particular communities — inner cities, for example — polygamy could take a toll much more quickly. Even a handful of high-status men taking multiple wives could create brigades of new recruits for street gangs and drug lords, the last thing those communities need.

Such problems are not merely theoretical. In northern Arizona, a polygamous Mormon sect has managed its surplus males by dumping them on the street; literally. The Arizona Republic has reported “The sect has orphaned more than 400 teenagers in order to leave young women for marriage to the older men.” The paper goes on to say that the boys are dropped off in neighboring towns, facing hunger, homelessness, and homesickness, and most cripplingly, a belief in a future of suffering and darkness.” unquote This is done so that old farts can stick their you-know-what into young teen-age women.

There was an article published in the early 1980s about a Kenyan man with 150 wives. The man obviously didn’t give a hoot about the existence of the other people in his village who were most definitely damaged by his polygamist behaviour: namely, the 149 guys who didn't get a wife at all because Mr. Take-It-All had married 150 of the women in the village.

No doubt it must be virtually impossible for that pig to imagine himself as one of the 149 losers, rather than the one big winner. He might prefer one wife to 150, but his male ego can't allow him to identify with all the men who end up rejected and alone. This psychological quirk in this pig’s brain creates a reality problem for the 149 men who lost their chances of marrying 149 of the women.

The upward mobility of women who might marry polygamous men with the resources to care for multiple wives and children could leave a dangerous number of lower-status males without sexual unions. Official monogamy may do less to protect the interests of women than to enforce sexual equality among men.

Whether or not we like to admit it, polygamy is part of the diverse fabric of family life in 21st century Australia, although admittedly a minority practice. This is partly because although Australian multiculturalism requires assent to the law of the land, many groups (for example, Jews, Catholics, Baha'is and Aborigines) also operate under community-imposed religio-legal codes, particularly when it comes to family relationships.

The presumably small number of Muslims who are polygamous can easily circumvent Australian law because they are merely engaging in religious relationships that have no legal standing. In most traditional interpretations of Islamic law, all that is required for a marriage to be religiously valid is an offer of marriage, including a dowry paid to the woman, and an acceptance of that offer in front of witnesses. Women may include conditions in the marriage contract, including monogamy.

Which brings us to Muslim attitudes towards polygamy. When news started filtering around the Australian Muslim grapevine of lobbying for polygamy to be recognized, reactions ranged from outrage to ambivalence to cautious approval. If ever there was evidence that Muslims do not speak with a single, homogeneous voice, this is it.

Muslims come from many different cultures, some of which historically viewed polygamy with great disapproval and imbued it with social stigma, and others that considered polygamy perfectly normal, although it seems the practice is becoming less popular even in many traditionally polygamous countries. This is not unlike the seismic shift Irish society has undergone in its attitudes to large families and contraception. Some families had 17 children or more and now the average Catholic family in Ireland has no more than two or three children.

For some reason, the topic of polygamy raises passionate debate. This is often because of the presumption and indeed, at times, the reality of the women involved getting short shrift. However, much depends on the autonomy of the women involved, and there is even a feminist argument to be made for polygamy.

The late professor Susan Hurley, in The Future of Gender, argues that the social glue of monogamy may be the result of our historical division of labour into hunters (men) and gatherers (women). Strong social boundaries around paired unions meant that men were less likely to be cuckolded when they went off to hunt for their females and offspring. In days long past, it was quite proper and honourable for men to marry many women because in times of war, many men were killed and the widows were left to fend for themselves. By marrying a man who was already married, the widows came under the protection of the man who then adopts her and her offspring by marrying her as a second wife.

Some supporters of polygamy point out that so long as all the partners involved are consenting, polygamy can offer alternative patterns of family life that satisfy different needs. What about the woman who desires a family but who fears jeopardizing her career success if she takes time out to raise children, coupled with one who longs for a large family with lots of children but who faces fertility issues, then a polygamous arrangement might suit them. This is a factor I am in sympathy with.

Nevertheless, the reality is that polygamy can leave women and children vulnerable. Ironically, it is probably easier to abuse polygamy in Australia, than in traditional Muslim societies, for Islamic law insists that polygamous men be held accountable for their responsibilities, particularly as the Koran warns that if a man is unable to treat more than one wife with justice, then he may not consider polygamy.

Does that mean we should change Australian law? I am not sure, but we should at least acknowledge that polygamy is a sad reality for some families and think about how best we might support the most vulnerable in such situations.

Here is an example of what can go wrong in a polygamist family. A fifteen-year-old girl living in a Palestinian village was beaten and dragged to the altar to marry a man 20 years her senior. After giving him six children, the man married a second woman who was a very young woman. When the second wife was in labour, the first wife was then told by her husband that she had to go out and work cleaning other people’s homes and to give her husband the money so that he could afford to support his big family.

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS Church) is one of the largest Mormon fundamentalist denominations and one of United States' largest practitioners of polygamy. The FLDS Church is estimated to have 10,000 members residing in the sister cities of Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona; Eldorado, Texas; Westcliffe, Colorado; Mancos, Colorado; Creston and Bountiful, British Columbia; and Pringle, South Dakota.

The FLDS is notorious in the United States for alleged sex crimes committed under the leadership of its prophet Warren Jeffs, who is now imprisoned in Utah and facing more similar charges in another U.S. state.

What follows is information from one of the former members of the FLDS who was raised as a polygamist in polygamist communities in Utah and Arizona.

Susie Barlow was nine years old when her father was removed from their home, apparently at the whim of FLDS authorities. Three years later, her mother learned she was to become the 12th spiritual wife to an Uncle Fred. Ms. Barlow remembers how her mother took the news. "She sat on the floor by the phone crying," Ms. Barlow writes in an affidavit filed in B.C. Supreme Court. "She seemed both sad and stunned. My first thought was that someone had died."

Ms. Barlow was married off herself, at age 16. "Warren Jeffs assigned me to enter into a 'spiritual marriage' with my cousin," she says in her affidavit. "My husband ... was 51 years old.... I became his second wife on December 21, 2001. That day was supposed to be the shortest day in the year, but it was the longest for me. Her account contradicts claims made by other FLDS women that their consent is required for marriage.

The man whom Ms. Barlow married already had 11 children with his first wife. Four of those children were older than her. Ms. Barlow says that she initially refused to have sexual relations with her husband; she submitted after two years, and only after Warren Jeffs "commanded" her. "The pressure on me became so intense I eventually had to hide in the canyon above our town for a few days to get away," she says in her affidavit.

Once, she agreed to go on a camping trip with her husband's son, who was six months older than her. "[He] took me up to a small town north of Salt Lake City about 350 miles from my home in Arizona," she says. "I was there three nights and four days. I was raped four times." Rather than alert police, she called on her husband to come pick her up. "I was told by my brothers that I don't deserve to see a doctor," she says.

Ms. Barlow was unable to complete the ninth grade; as a young wife, she says, she was too busy. Eventually, she was removed from her husband's house and placed in a "guest house" in another town. She was being "corrected." She could not be "corrected." She started to drink and to smoke, and was moved to another house, in yet another town. There, she made a friend who helped her to "escape" the FLDS.
Four years ago, after becoming a free person, Ms. Barlow obtained her high school general equivalency degree. She obtained a general nursing assistant's licence. She's now with a caring and loving man. The FLDS does not permit her to contact her mother and her siblings, she says. She describes her experience as "very typical for an FLDS child."

In Saudi Arabia, the princes of the realm marry many wives and have many children so that they can expand their power and prestige in that country. Even in wealthy polygamous households, wives are disadvantaged. They often have to fight for their children’s position in the family with respect to the pecking order and haggle over their share of the inheritance when their husbands die.

Polygamy is an affront to the principle of equality between the sexes. You would think that this would be an issue that is championed as a women’s issue. Sadly, it gets little attention from international organizations, even on International Women’s Day.

The practice is common in the Muslim world, and is becoming common practice in Europe, as well.

The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten reported statements from Norway’s Directorate of Immigration (UDI) that there are an increasing number of men with multiple wives in Norway. It said “The reason is married men travel to countries where polygamy is legal and then add a wife.”

UDI spokesman Karl Erik Sjøholt said in part, “Though polygamy is illegal in Norway, this is something that Norwegian authorities cannot prevent.” The Islamic Cultural Center Norway (ICCN), an immigrant organization subsidized by the Norwegian state, advises Muslims in Norway to take several wives because polygamy is advantageous and ought to be practiced where conditions lend themselves to such practices.

Polygamy should not be acceptable in American or Canadian Civil Law. It should not be permitted and those that practice it should be charged and sent to prison. Further, those people who practice polygamy in other countries should not be permitted to enter our countries. To permit them entry into our countries is giving approval to the practice of polygamy. It would also be unjust and unfair to let polygamists from other countries move into our countries while at the same time; we are punishing our own polygamists?

The British Columbia Supreme Court is now dealing with the issue of whether or not the Canadian law that outlaws polygamy conflicts with the constitutional right to freedom of religion. It is my view; that it does not.

A true Mormon does not preach polygamy as being part of their religion. If people wanted to break away from their religion and create another one just so that they can live a polygamist form of life and in doing so, break the law, they cannot expect the courts to support them.

Suppose a radical group of people argue that cannibalism is part of their religion; do they have the right to argue that they should be permitted to cannibalize human beings because to deny them that right is a breach of their constitutional rights to freedom of religion? Don’t get me wrong. I am not equating such a group with polygamists but simply using it as an extreme example to get a point across.

Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states;

"Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance."

The polygamist could argue that although they believe in the basic tenets of the Latter Day Saints, they have the right to change their belief (if only a small part of it) and change that a part of their belief to permit polygamy as a life style.

For example, the Catholics up until recently were told by the Vatican that they should not use condoms but now the Vatican has stated that in certain situations, it is permitted. That is a change.

I believe that the issue of polygamy being a religious right under the constitution is boiled down to one simple question and that is, is it against the law? If it is, then the polygamists cannot practice polygamy unless that law is changed; and that happening seems very unlikely.

Even if the court were to rule that the anti-polygamy law is unconstitutional, the court can still decide not to strike it down since section 24 of the Charter of Rights can be invoked. That section is used by the courts if the law is unconstitutional but it is in the best interest of the citizens of Canada to permit it to remain as a law.

As soon as the British Columbia Supreme Court makes a ruling on this issue, I will give my readers an update on this very interesting issue.