Progressive groups are lined up on either side of the ongoing court hearing in B.C. about the constitutionality of Canada's anti-polygamy law. That is not surprising, as the issues are complex and the best outcome is not at all obvious.
What is criminalized
The crime of polygamy may invoke the image of coerced marriages of multiple adolescent girls to older male church members in the town of Bountiful. However, Code section 293 criminalizes a far wider range of domestic arrangements.
In Canada, it is a crime for any three or more people, of whatever gender, to agree to enter into any kind of "conjugal union" whether or not this arrangement includes a sexual relationship. Or even to celebrate or assist anyone entering into such an agreement.
So arguably, the former television sit-com Three’s Company depicted the commission of a criminal offence, especially if (as many viewers may have imagined) more was going on among the three characters when the cameras were switched off.
Three women, or three men, or any combination of any number greater than two, forming a marriage-like relationship are guilty of an indictable offence and can face up to five years in jail.
Focus on harm
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Groups who support the constitutionality of this section of the Criminal Code tend not to focus on the status of multiple-party relationships so much as the incidence of harm to women and children in some forms of polygamy (like what prevails in Bountiful, B.C.). As repugnant as the treatment of young girls in that religious cult may be, the reach of section 293 extends far beyond that kind of situation.
Although a large proportion of abuse and assault against women and children occurs within heterosexual monogamous family structures, nobody has suggested that those relationships should also be criminalized.
If the problem which needs criminalization is not the family structure per se, but rather such abuses as coerced marriages and abuse of minors, those are the behaviours which the Criminal Code should address. And it does, without section 293.
Non-traditional family relationships
Whatever your views about the practice of menage à trois, it should not be a crime to enter into a non-traditional domestic relationship. The arguments supporting maintaining the polygamy section of the Code sometimes resonate uncomfortably with those against same-sex marriage and adoption. The whole point of having a Charter of Rights is to ensure that restrictions on our freedoms are defensible on a rigorous, rational and principled basis.
The line between what is permitted and what is prohibited must be drawn with great care so that (as with the crime of polygamy) we do not trample on other rights as collateral damage in our efforts to prevent social harm.
So if the problem is abusive or coercive polygamous relationships, criminalize abuse and coercion (which we already have done).
Another decent article. I even happen to agree with the reasons and conclusion.
Any article which fails to note that polygamous set-ups generally involve one man - many women, and not the contrary, is distressingly incomplete, to say the least.
Polygamy should not be criminalized. It should not, however, be recognized as marriage either. It is the subordination, subjugation, and humiliation of women. To talk about whether it is "coercive" or not is quite as self-deceptive as talking about whether wage labour is coercive or not.
Unfortunately although abuse and coercion are criminal the law has not been upheld when the victims are girls in polygamy. It has been a violation of their civil rights as the law enforcement establishment looked the other way time and time again based on the religion of the abuser. Some people say that if you decriminalize polygamy the abuse will stop. Obviously these people have no respect for the law. Many polygamists in the American west believe that as soon as a girl has her menses she is a woman and ready for marriage. Decriminalizing polygamy will not stop their abuse why would it? Crimes in Canada were reported again and again. I personally reported numerous girls being trafficked to Canada and if polygamy is legal in Canada but not the U.S. the trafficking will only increase. I personally reported that Winston Blackmore had taken young teens for his brides, numbers of them trafficked from the U.S. Nothing was done. 10 years later he admitted to marrying nine girls 15 and 16 years old. Was he arrested for abuse? No. If polygamy is legalized it gives the green light to continue the abuses after all no one in Canada has ever been charged with the abuses in polygamy that they even admit to on television. Winston Blackmore has never been charged with using children for slave labor. Yes, there are crimes but as long as you are a polygamist you can do them and never suffer any consequences. That will not stop with legalization, it has not stopped abuse of girls in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Yemen and it won't in Canada it will only increase them.
Should honor killing be legal in British Columbia if it based on a religious belief?
Polygamy requires an unnatural ratio of male to female. Young males are excess. It is an abusive secretive culture based on domination by the alpha males. Also please note that the leading cause of death of girls 15 to 19 worldwide is pregnancy. We have seen from the statistics that they have no qualms about impregnating 16 year old girls and the rate of pregnancy of teenaged girls in Bountiful was much much higher than the rest of Canada, even the surrounding areas.
Although abuse does happen in heterosexual monogomous marraiges, seldom does the religious leader, mother, father, and the man committing the abuse agree that it is not only perfectly fine but desirable for him to have sexual relations with an underaged girl. That happens with almost every single abuse case in polygamy. Winston Blackmore wrote an article on his blog that Kelly Fischer's wife and step daughter should protect the sacred family secrets, What were those secrets? That Kelly was married to the mother and his 15 year old step daughter at the same time. Proof positive that the polygamists in Canada supported sexual abuse. One girl was taken to Canada to get out of marriage to her step father, who was also married to her mother and a sister. She was made the 3rd wife to a 50 year old man in Canada, she was 16. Does this occur in monogomous marriages? It couldn't! So lets not be naive and say that abuse in polygamy is just like in other marriages. In polygamy is it institutionalized abuse from which girls born into the culture and brainwashed into thinking that they must be concubines and breeding stock to receive salvation have no rights. One girl told me that she wasn't even allowed to laugh because it showed too much emotion. These girls prisoners within that society raised to accept abuse. Do not legalize this abuse.
katchalater, you make a lot of claims about what "always" or "almost always" happens. They may reflect what has happened to you, or to people you've heard from. Nonetheless, that's not what even <em>usually</em> happens, let alone always.
The article quotes section 293. It obviously outlaws all kinds of multiple-person relationships, abusive or not. You seem to think non-abusive ones don't happen. You are wrong.
You say that "polygamous set-ups always involve one man - many women". That's absolutely and obviously false. I myself am one of two men with one woman. I know other families like my own, and I know of many more. Members of at least five such families have filed affidavits in the reference case.
Modern, egalitarian polyamorists don't usually like or use the word "polygamy", but what we do is polygamy under the law. In Canada, there seem to be at least as many of us as there are traditional or religious patriarchal polygynists... and probably more.
You say "Polygamy requires an unnatural ratio of male to female". That's false. Our community has about as much polyandry as polygyny, and around the same number of attached men as attached women... and that's ignoring other structures a lot of straight people don't seem to be able to get their heads around. The person "in the middle" of a relationship of one man and two women isn't always the man. And, by the way, if anything, we tend to marry old.
You say that "Winston Blackmore wrote an article on his blog [etc]"... and that betrays your basic misconception. You're treating Bountiful, with its 35 families, as the paradigm, and forgetting about thousands of other families. I don't really know what happens in Bountiful; all I have comes from the press and court papers. I do know that, whatever things are like there, Bountiful is a microscopic and very atypical minority. Even if it weren't perfectly possible to address the abuse directly, rather than through a clumsy proxy like a law against polygamy, the fact that that law criminalizes thousands of completely innocent people means that it cannot be upheld.