To the Exclusion of All Others
In a liberal society, is polygamy still intolerable?
BY ELIZABETH ABBOTT
Two decades ago, RCMP officers drove up a winding road through the Creston Valley of southeastern British Columbia, past fields of timothy hay and cottonwood stands, to an unmarked settlement known as Bountiful. It looked a typical rural town — homesteads bordered by well-kept yards full of children running and swinging and cycling — but, in fact, the officers had come to investigate a complaint that two local patriarchs, young gun Winston Blackmore and his fifty-seven-year old father-in-law Dalmon Oler, were polygamists — an offence under Section 293 of the Criminal Code.
All 1,000 or so residents of Bountiful are members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), a Mormon sect that believes God’s chosen leaders should each marry several virgins and “multiply and replenish the Earth… that they may bear the souls of men.” Unashamed, Oler invited the officers into the fifteen-bedroom home he shared with his five wives and forty-eight children. Blackmore, who in addition to leading Canada’s FLDS operated a multimillion-dollar logging, trucking, and manufacturing business, was cagier about numbers, only admitting to having more than one wife. He was rumoured, however, to have at least twenty-five (many underage at the time he married them), and more than eighty children.
After a year-long investigation, the case seemed completely straightforward, but lawyers knew otherwise. While the Criminal Code defines polygamy as a crime, the Charter of Rights guarantees religious freedom, and in the summer of 1992, after consulting various constitutional experts, the BC attorney general’s office officially rejected the RCMP recommendations, on the grounds that Section 293 was invalid. Blackmore, puffed up with victory, is said to have mounted a framed copy of the Charter on his office wall.
But his troubles were far from over. Blackmore would soon became embroiled in an internecine leadership struggle with James Marion Oler, son of Dalmon; more concerning, Bountiful suffered from growing image problems. In the wake of the thwarted charges, BC’s secretary of state for women’s equality commissioned a committee on polygamy issues, which in May 1993 issued Life in Bountiful, a powerful indictment of polygamy, in particular forced marriage and extreme demands of obedience. “When does a culture stop being a culture,” the report concluded rhetorically, “and start being abuse?” A decade later, one of the committee members, escaped FLDS wife Debbie Palmer, published Keep Sweet, a sensational memoir dedicated to her eight children, “who lived through unspeakable horrors before I brought them out.” And in 2008, Vancouver Sun columnist Daphne Bramham published The Secret Lives of Saints: Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada’s Polygamous Mormon Sect, which documented, along with the sad fate of Bountiful’s girls, that of its boys, who were yanked from school and put to work, or expelled from the community to eliminate competition for brides.
The year after the book was released, BC’s attorney general, Wally Oppal, laid polygamy charges against Blackmore and James Oler (who replaced the former as bishop in 2002) and had the RCMP arrest them. In his determination to do so, however, Oppal had ignored government lawyers who maintained the charge wouldn’t stand up to a Charter challenge, instead appointing successive independent prosecutors until he found one who recommended laying charges, which the court then quashed on procedural grounds. (Blackmore is now suing the BC government for expenses related to “unlawful” prosecution.) When Oppal lost a subsequent election, his successor, Mike de Jong, filed a constitutional reference in which he asked the BC Supreme Court to contend with the conflict between the Criminal Code and the Charter of Rights at last.
When the trial opened on November 22, 2010, a stream of participants and witnesses for the government, including representatives from the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children, REAL Women of Canada, the Christian Legal Fellowship, and academic experts, testified about the many harms associated with polygamy. Most convincing, perhaps, was the testimony of former FLDS members. Carolyn Jessop, who fled a community in Utah with her eight children in the middle of the night, summed it up well: “Polygamy is not pretty to look at. It is nice that it is tucked away in a dark corner where nobody has to see its realities, because it’s creepy.”
But George Macintosh, the amicus curiae (friend of the court) appointed to present the opposing argument, came out swinging. He characterized Section 293 as an overly broad and grossly disproportionate law rooted in Christian prejudices, a law demeaning to polygamists. Women in polygamous marriages anonymously testified that they were happy, that they’d made the right decision. According to CBC, the BC Civil Liberties Association argued that “consenting adults have the right — the Charter protected right — to form the families that they want to form.” And the Canadian Association for Free Expression maintained that the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2005 strengthened the individual’s right to enter a polygamous marriage.
The rights argument carries considerable weight in a liberal society — if it didn’t, we wouldn’t still be faced with the Bountiful problem. We’ll find out what the court makes of it all by the end of the year. Something that hasn’t been fully considered but should be factored in to any reasonable decision is that rights can’t be separated from the culture in which they arise. They are inextricably linked to institutions that form the backbone of a society, and in every society throughout history the fundamental organizing institution has always been marriage.
One of the oldest extant marriage documents comes from ancient Babylonia, in the reign of Ammi-ditana (1683–1640 BC): the dowry register for Sabitum, daughter of Ibbatum, who gave her as wife into the house of Ilšu-ibni, for his son Warad-Kubi. Sabitum’s dowry consisted of two beds, two chairs, one table, two chests, one grindstone, one grindstone for flour, one ten-litre container, and one emptyšikkatum jar. In return, Ibbatum received ten silver shekels, and he tied that money into the fringe of Sabitum’s dress to be given back to Warad-Kubi. From the beginning, it seems, marriage has been a financial agreement, a way of distributing resources.
But it has not been exclusively monogamous. In old Babylonia, for example, the marriage contract might include a stipulation for polygamy; Warad-Kubi may have taken more wives than Sabitum. (This arrangement is more precisely called polygyny, but because the alternative form of polygamy — one wife with many husbands — is so rare, the distinction is rarely made.) While polygamy would never be the primary form of marriage — as Bountiful illustrates, huge segments of the male population would be out of luck — it was certainly widespread. And it’s clear that it provided unique advantages.
Polygamy acted as husbandly insurance against an individual wife’s barrenness, as well as high child mortality rates, and made ill or aging wives less burdensome. If it was taboo to have sex with pregnant and lactating women (which increased a nursing child’s chances of survival), new fathers suffered neither sexual privation nor a waiting period to produce another child. And with so many children, polygamists had plenty of sons to work the land or contribute to their commercial ventures; in militaristic societies, these sons were prized as military recruits. Daughters, less valued, were still useful for domestic work, or to be advantageously married off to polygamous men.
Of course, polygamy is entrenched in another ancient institution, patriarchy, and in this context of women’s assumed dependence it actually offered them certain protections. Consider Sabitum again: She was very unlikely to try to leave her husband — if she did, she was to be tied up and drowned. If he renounced her, he was to pay her a small lump sum, but in the absence of any kind of social safety net she would essentially be left destitute. If he died, she was in even worse shape. The expandable nature of the polygamous union meant there was a better chance another man would take her in. It also meant men were less likley to renounce unwanted, old, sick, or barren wives in the first place; even if they were shunted aside in favour of younger, healthier women, they at least remained married. (Polygamy was particularly useful in wartime, when there were fewer eligible men.) Co-wives would typically share a residence or compound, co-operating in household duties, including raising one another’s children. To overworked women who dreaded the sexual relations that could result in yet another pregnancy, the arrangement might have seemed like a godsend.
And yet it could also very easily succumb to ever-simmering tensions and jealousies. This was especially true with regard to children, rivals for their father’s attention and resources, and whose interests each mother attempted to promote at the expense of the other children. In all but the wealthiest households, supporting so many adults and offspring was a strain on the patriarch, and some of his dependents inevitably lost out. Moreover, an unhappy woman had little choice but to endure her lot; even if the prospect of single life seemed preferable, she would be forced to leave her children behind, possibly with an angry father and vindictive co-wives. Being trapped in this way meant there was always tremendous potential for injustice in the polygamous union.
Islam, which permits but does not prescribe polygamy, tacitly acknowledges that potential with guidelines. “Marry such women as seem good to you, two and three and four,” it says in Surah 4:3 of the Koran, “but if you fear that you will not do justice (between them), then (marry) only one or what your right hands possess; this is more proper, that you may not deviate from the right course.” The sacred text also limits wives to four, no two sisters at the same time, and even then warns, “You will never be able to do perfect justice between wives even if it is your ardent desire, so do not incline too much to one of them (by giving her more of your time and provision) so as to leave the other hanging,” so that she feels neither married nor divorced (Surah 4:129).
Islamic polygamy remains strongly rooted in places like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Mali, and Nigeria. In West Africa, the continent’s most polygamous region, an estimated 40 percent of all marriages are polygamous. It’s therefore not surprising that a burgeoning immigrant polygamous community can be found in Canada. Immigration officials don’t generally admit multiple wives, but there are reports that religious leaders in Toronto and Ottawa are performing polygamous marriages. One imam from Scarborough, who spoke recently with the Canadian Press, estimates there are some 200 such marriages in the Greater Toronto Area alone. In a 2007 Maclean’s article, several Muslim immigrant women explain that polygamy solves certain problems, such as a wife’s barrenness or even her time of the month: “Rather than a man getting into a wrong thing in dating women and bringing a sickness — AIDS and all that,” one says, “better he should marry [additional wives].” But while a Muslim leader from Mississauga insists Canada should allow polygamy (“We should respect different people”), the immigrant community has been conspicuously silent during the BC trial, most likely because it doesn’t want to further compromise its position in a country that has, like others in the West, summarily rejected polygamy.
While early Christian patriarchs were polygamous — the Biblical King Solomon, with 700 wives, spectacularly so — the Church gradually renounced the practice, largely because Greco-Roman culture happened to prescribe monogamy. Christians born into the monogamous tradition explained away the Old Testament’s stories about polygamy as a fast track to fulfill God’s instructions to populate the world when it had fewer people, and theologians eventually made it official. In chapter 7 of On the Good of Marriage, AD 401, St. Augustine wrote, “Now indeed in our time, and in keeping with Roman custom, it is no longer allowed to take another wife.”
As with polygamy, women’s subordinate status shaped this version of marriage; wives had no legal status apart from their husbands, and vowed to serve and obey them in return for protection and support. Privileged men could indulge in romantic, erotic love affairs with mistresses, flaunting them as a polygamist would an appealing new wife, without greatly damaging their marriages or their wives’ status. Their resources (and, postmortem, their estates) remained the inheritance of their wife’s children; their illegitimate children had no claims at all. Monogamy seldom provided fathers with a large pool of potential workers, but then slavery and serfdom made for good substitutes.
By about 1300, Christianity had spread across Europe, and despite pockets of resistance — the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, for instance — installed monogamy along with it. Little changed until, in the eighteenth century, the Western world was rocked by the combined force of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. While philosophers and political thinkers challenged age-old assumptions about authority, industry created a resource-rich middle class, which increasingly populated cities, where word spread quickly: the divine right of kings had given way to the notion of universal rights to life, liberty, and property.
These new ideas ultimately altered the balance of power between men and women, and transformed society and marriage, its core institution. The family’s control over its children’s marriages was increasingly tempered by a regard for individual preferences, and the idea of marrying for love gained momentum. Love would provide companionship, emotional satisfaction, and, most important, an end to the cruelty that marked so many marriages. Women saw love as the lifeline to a decent life, an assurance that they would be treated respectfully by their husbands. As a result, many resisted marrying until they inspired love (and not just interest in their dowries) in a prospective husband. In a journal entry dated March 6, 1830, for instance, Upper Canadian Mary Gapper reported that she’d agreed to marry Edward O’Brien only after concluding that she would gain “the possession of a heart capable of entering into all my views and feelings and attached to me with an affection so exactly suited to my humour that I sometimes almost fancy that I must myself have dictated it.”
But as love and marriage became increasingly linked in the popular mind, so did the idea of ending loveless marriages — a significant peril of this new incarnation of monogamy. For the profoundly religious, dissolving a marriage isn’t an option, but by the nineteenth century the traditional authority of Christian churches had declined significantly, and divorce became a legal rather than a moral issue. In 1857, the British Matrimonial Causes Act made divorce available to Canadian women, but only if they could prove adultery coupled with perverse or cruel behaviours such as bigamy, incest, or bestiality, and even then only by act of Parliament. A small cohort of women seeking divorce ventured south of the border, where it had been widely available by mid-century. Over the next few decades, however, incremental reforms to Canadian property law gave married women the right to retain their own wages and eventually, by 1884, to manage and dispose of their own property. The conditions under which departing wives could gain custody of their children were also expanding, and by 1887 the court was basing its decisions on the best interests of the children and the condition of both parents. In 1968, Canada passed the Divorce Act, with provisions for no-fault divorce and universal access to spousal support. By making it feasible for women to leave, divorce law had effectively liberalized marriage.
Meanwhile, a great deal of liberal infrastructure was developing around the concept of monogamy. Take personal income tax: first levied in 1917 to finance the First World War, it became the welfare state’s greatest source of revenue, and the calculation always assumed monogamy, simply because that was the only legal form of marriage. Single men were presumed to need less money and were taxed 4 percent on all income over $1,500, while married men were entitled to an exemption on the first $3,000, enabling them to support two-person family units. Today, the basic personal exemption ($10,382 for 2010) applies equally to all, but tax benefits and credits are calculated according to marital status, which of course still means one spouse or none. And the same basic configuration has shaped most modern benefit programs: social assistance, Employment Insurance, Old Age Security or the Canadian Pension Plan, private health insurance, and pensions.
It is in this context that polygamy has come to seem an abomination. Except for a few isolated cases, it was rare until the sudden appearance of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 1830s. Joseph Smith was living in Pennsylvania when an angel named Moroni revealed to him the location of a set of buried golden plates engraved with sacred text, which he then translated using seer stones and published inThe Book of Mormon. God also told him that in order to be “exalted” in the afterlife, certain leaders should marry more than one woman and have many children. Smith obeyed, marrying a succession of women, many of them teenagers or the wives of other men. He might have got away with it, but he decided to run for president in 1844, and was eventually murdered by an armed mob. His successor, Brigham Young, led the Mormons to the isolated frontier of Utah, but the government wasn’t about to forget about them. In 1878, a year after Young died, having “sealed” with or married fifty-six women who collectively bore him fifty-seven children, the US Supreme Court criminalized polygamy. Canada followed suit twelve years later with Article 278 of the Canadian Criminal Code, which outlawed “what among the persons commonly called Mormons is known as spiritual or plural marriage.”
To save their church and their hides, most members of the Church of Latter-day Saints officially renounced polygamy, but a small breakaway group of ex-Mormons, the FLDS, established polygamous communities in remote areas of Utah, Arizona, Texas — and, in 1946, Lister, BC. Not only was the town remote from “gentile” society, but its founders also assumed that the Canadian government, which had been recruiting badly needed settlers from persecuted European sects such as the Hutterites and Doukhobors, would keep its distance. Later, polygamous men in the US who struggled to support huge households flocked to Lister, where they could rely on help from the state: their Canadian(ized) wives were eligible for free medical care, daycare subsidies, and eventually the Old Age Pension. As soon as the women were impregnated, their status as technically single mothers also entitled them to claim welfare assistance and other child benefits, a practice known as “bleeding the beast.” By the early 1980s, several hundred members lived in the community, including Winston Blackmore, one of the thirty-one children of Ray Blackmore, an early bishop of Lister. On assuming the mantle in 1984, Winston renamed it Bountiful.
There is something unsavoury about a smug patriarch like Winston Blackmore taking advantage of Canada’s liberal institutions, but isn’t that bad taste the best test of our commitment to liberalism? Rights advocates are accustomed to holding their noses. When a human rights complaint was brought against Alberta pastor Stephen Boissoin for a viciously homophobic letter to the editor published in the Red Deer Advocate in 2002, a spokesman for the gay rights group Egale responded, “When that opinion is vehement and hurtful, it’s even more challenging to defend the right of that opinion to be expressed… [But] support his right, we must. If Boissoin was no longer able to share his views, then who might be next in also having their freedom of expression limited.” And, by the same token, a handful of conservative Christians have advocated for civil same-sex marriage. So why shouldn’t we find a way to advocate on behalf of Winston Blackmore in his struggle to practise polygamy unhindered, on the grounds of religious freedom? Why not, in fact, open up marriage to polygamists by legalizing the right to engage in it?
In answering that question, it’s useful to imagine for a moment doing so. Among all the benefits programs we would have to overhaul, perhaps the most satisfying would be welfare, since we could prevent the wives of Bountiful from “bleeding the beast.” This would entail creating a system to accurately assess household income in a family with multiple earning spouses, as well as accounting for economies of scale, i.e., the second wife should be less expensive than the first, the third less expensive than the second, and so on. But exactly how much less expensive? And how would the money be divided among the wives? The same complex issues would arise in the process of adapting various benefit programs that hinge on marriage, and in all but welfare the project would be further confounded by the fact that multiple wives would cost the provider more. Consider Old Age Security: currently, a recipient’s spouse is entitled to an allowance. If that remained, the Blackmores’ household alone could collectively stand to clear more than twenty-six times the norm; on the other hand, any attempt by the government to cap benefits for legally married plural spouses would undoubtedly lead to costly constitutional challenges. When the Ontario court ruled, in 1999, that the definition of common law marriage included same-sex unions, the provincial government had to amend sixty-seven statutes, but that’s nothing compared to the nation-wide administrative crisis that would ensue if we attempted to accommodate polygamy.
The thornier issue, however, is marriage itself. The legislated definition of marriage as “the lawful union of two persons to the exclusion of all others,” was only just passed in 2005, and would be easy enough to fix by deleting the second clause. But divorce law, which is how the state promotes equality within monogamous unions, is ill equipped to do the same within polygamous ones. Provincial laws currently ensure that when two parties end a marriage, assets accumulated during the relationship are divided equally, with limited exceptions. How much of a husband’s contribution to the marital property would a departing wife receive if she had eight co-wives? One-tenth? But what if those wives appeared on the scene later or earlier — or both? Finally, what, if any, of theircontribution would she have a right to? The women didn’t marry each other; they married their husband. And that’s why it would not only be infinitely complicated to apply divorce law to polygamy; it would never meet Western liberal standards of fairness. A husband could always dilute his wife’s stake in the family assets by unilaterally deciding to marry another wife.
American legal scholar Adrienne Davis, who believes that conventional family law rooted in monogamous marriage may not be up to attempts at cobbling polygamous marriage onto it, points out an alternative: commercial partnership law. Typically used when two or more parties go into business, according to Davis it would certainly address “polygamy’s central conundrum: ensuring fairness and establishing baseline behaviour in contexts characterized by multiple partners, on-going entrances and exits, and life-defining economic and personal stakes.” Of course, there would be a huge administrative cost to both adapting the model to marriage, and to ensuring that over the course of a union all partners consented to any new additions to it and renegotiated their respective rights as the landscape changed. More to the point, however, this is not what polygamists want, and it’s not what we want. Remember, liberal marriage was built on the concept of love; it’s hard to imagine a way of squaring this with the filing of an annual marriage report.
In our longing to ensure that everyone enjoys every possible right, we have been willing to stretch our imaginations, swallow our bile, and give polygamy a chance. That is no less than our values demand of us. But legalizing it is not ultimately in the same category as granting a pastor the right to express his loathing of homosexuality, or as legalizing gay marriage. While much has been made, in particular, of the parallel between sanctioning same-sex unions and sanctioning polygamy, not least by Blackmore himself (at one point, he went so far as to suggest that the marriage of one of his Canadian wives with an American wife was proof of his support for gay marriage, and not a ploy to outfox immigration regulations), the outcomes couldn’t be more different. The former brought people into an existing system of rights; the latter poses a significant threat to that system. And that’s probably our cue, as a liberal society, to hold our noses and draw the line.
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Elizabeth Abbott has written six books, including A History of Marriage (2009) and A History of Mistresses (2003). Sugar: A Bittersweet History was shortlisted for the 2009 Charles Taylor Prize.
Stop Polygamy in Canada website has notes taken by observers in the courtroom as well as links to most of the affidavits and research the court is considering in this case.
Legal expert tells Canadian court polygamy prohibitions and monogamy tradition pre-date Christianity
BC government has acted quicker to protect animals than the abused children of Mormon fundamentalists in Bountiful
Children's rights group tells court BC put rights of Mormon fundamentalist parents before rights of children
Teachers tell court BC government neglected children's educational rights in Mormon fundamentalist community
Court appointed lawyer says Canadian polygamy law criminalizes harmless behaviour, violates religious freedom of adults
Research from over 170 countries shows polygamy causes extreme violations of women and children's rights
Author who escaped abuse in US polygamy cult explains why Canadian constitutional case is so important in both countries
Evidence in Canadian polygamy case shows Mormon leader trafficked his daughters and other child brides to US
Religious practice not above the law, polygamy consumes its young says Attorney General of BC in closing argument
Summary of positions in Canadian constitutional case on polygamy as court begins hearing final oral arguments
Lawyer says extraordinary evidence in Canadian case shows polygamous society consumes children, harms women
A review of the Canadian constitutional case on polygamy after completion of testimonies
Canadian Muslim polygamists closely watching landmark constitutional case on Canadian polygamy law
Economics professor considers financial aspects of polygamy that create inequality
Legal expert tells Canadian court polygamy prohibitions and monogamy tradition pre-date Christianity
B.C. government expert in polygamy case sets out long list of social harms, societies that abandon polygamy do better
Polygamy expert tells court in constitutional case that it reduces women's freedom and equality and leads to forced marriage
Polygyny and Canada’s Obligations under International Human Rights Law (pdf)
Research paper submitted to B.C. court in constitutional case documents harms associated with polygamy
Bountiful evidence that polygamy harms women and children - constitutional case likely to reach Canadian Supreme Court
Some religious practices, such as polygamy, are inherently harmful and should not be tolerated in modern society
Women's adovcates: polygamy is an “oppressive institution” that abuses and enslaves women and children
Prosecuting Polygamy in El Dorado by Marci Hamilton
Senate Judiciary Committee Holds Hearings on Polygamy Crimes: What Needs to Be Done at the Federal Level to Protect Children from Abuse and Neglect
Senate hearing: "Crimes Associated with Polygamy: The Need for a Coordinated State and Federal Response."
Texas Will Attempt to Show That Polygamist Culture Itself Harms Children
Israeli politicians and women's advocates call for immediate change to polygamy law to protect rights of women and children
New study on polygamy in Malaysia finds evidence of harm to everyone involved
Indonesian Women's Association divided on whether polygamy, which is legal in Indonesia, is harmful to women and children
Religious practice not above the law, polygamy consumes its young says Attorney General of BC in closing argument
Summary of positions in Canadian constitutional case on polygamy as court begins hearing final oral arguments
Lawyer fighting Canadian polygamy law says it violates religious freedom, need new law against forced marriage
BC Civil Liberties Association lawyer defends adult human rights in polygamy case, no mention of children's rights
BC Civil Liberties Association tells Canadian court law against polygamy violates personal freedoms, should be scrapped
Lawyer says extraordinary evidence in Canadian case shows polygamous society consumes children, harms women
FLDS children raised for a life of poverty and servitude to their insane pedophile prophet Warren Jeffs
Child rapist Warren Jeffs predicts doomsday for an "evil wicked sinful world" if he is not freed from prison
Warren Jeffs diary submitted to Canadian court reveals three more child brides smuggled to US for FLDS leaders
RCMP renew investigation of Mormon polygamists on new evidence of child bride trafficking to US
Warren Jeffs ordered Canadian parents to smuggle daughters as young as 12 into US to be his brides
BC government failed to act on evidence of child bride trafficking after 2008 Texas raid on polygamists
Judge hearing polygamy case asked to allow new evidence of child bride trafficking between Canada and US
Canadian Muslim polygamists closely watching landmark constitutional case on Canadian polygamy law
Rape charge dropped in plea deal for FLDS man who married 14 year old cousin, pleads guilty to lesser charges
Jeffs retakes legal control of FLDS from prison, court rules Utah illegally took over sect's property trust
Intellectual abuse of Mormon fundamentalist children means few will finish high school or go to college
Canadian polygamy case hears additional witnesses, school that intellectually abuses children given top ranking
Utah authorities say ruling in Canadian polygamy case will have no bearing on US law
Final arguments in Canadian constitutional hearing on polygamy will be broadcast on TV and Web
Closing arguments in Canadian polygamy case set for March 2011, but what about evidence of crimes exposed in testimony?
Canadian polygamy case hears evidence on high rates of teen pregnancies in fundamentalist Mormon community
Canadian polygamy case hears additional witnesses, school that intellectually abuses children given top ranking
Polygamy prohibition is a reasonable limit on religious freedom to protect the equality rights of women and children
A review of the Canadian constitutional case on polygamy after completion of testimonies
For Mormon polygamists in Canadian case religious freedom means enslaving women, sexualizing girls, exploiting boys
Two more plural wives testify in Canadian polygamy case, see no problem with forced marriage or trafficking child brides
Testimony of first FLDS witness in Canadian polygamy case reveals women in denial that their children are being abused
First anonymous FLDS witness in Canadian polygamy case paints cosy picture of plural marriage, seems oblivious to abuses
Affidavit in Canadian polygamy case reveals shocking statistics on child trafficking, child brides and teen mothers in Bountiful
Economics professor considers financial aspects of polygamy that create inequality
Two Mormon fundamentalist women from Utah tell Canadian court positive accounts of polygamy, no hint of abuse
Brother of FLDS bishop describes intellectual abuse, child labour, spiritual abuse and loveless religion in Canadian polygamy case
No freedom from religion for women and children in Mormon polygamist towns where men claim religious freedom to abuse
Mormon polygamist survivor tells court babies smothered to keep quiet, emotional and spiritual abuse worse than sex abuse
Video testimony by Mormon fundamentalist in Canadian court says polygamy provides happy life and harms no one
Survivor tells Canadian court extreme abuses including water torture of babies common in Mormon polygamist communities
FLDS bishop of Bountiful will not testify in Canadian polygamy case so his affidavit will not be read into record
Legal expert tells Canadian court polygamy prohibitions and monogamy tradition pre-date Christianity
The issue of women's rights in the Canadian constitutional review of the polygamy law
Another week of conflicting expert testimony as constitutional hearing on Canadian polygamy law continues
Before holiday break in constitutional case judge hears conflicting expert testimony on harms associated with polygamy
Expert in polygamy case says society should assume all members of sects have free choice, but what about children?
B.C. government expert in polygamy case sets out long list of social harms, societies that abandon polygamy do better
Court views video affidavits from Mormon fundamentalist survivors detailing pedophilia, incest, child trafficking and forced marriage
Polygamy expert tells court in constitutional case that it reduces women's freedom and equality and leads to forced marriage
Affidavits from survivors and psychologist's testimony in constitutional case show abusive nature of polygamous lifestyle
Expert witness in constitutional case on polygamy claims Bountiful women freely choose their own religious oppression
Judge allows controversial expert witness to testify in Canadian polygamy case, no decision yet on publication of video affidavits
Pro-polygamy intervenor groups make opening statements as first week of Canadian constitutional case ends
FLDS lawyer in Canadian constitutional case on polygamy claims members freely consent to plural marriage, abuse survivors disagree
Lawyer appointed to argue for striking down Canada's anti-polygamy law in constitutional case makes opening arguments
Canadian constitutional case on polygamy begins with BC government's opening statement
Unique Canadian constitutional case on polygamy set to begin November 22, 2010
Timeline of events leading up to Canadian constitutional case on polygamy which is set to begin
Survivor of abuse by Mormon polygamists documents accounts of sex crimes in the FLDS and other fundamentalist groups
Mormon fundamentalist leader asks court to exclude evidence against him in Canadian constitutional case on polygamy
Fundamentalist Mormon spokeswoman says polygamy doesn't hurt anyone
Mormon fundamentalist claims of religious persecution in Canadian constitutional case on polygamy not supported by the facts
Polygamist leader says BC attorney general guilty of religious persecution
Polygamist leader calls charges religious persecution
More persecution than prosecution
Second Mormon polygamist found guilty of child sex assault, jury doesn't buy defense claim of religious persecution
Claims of persecution ridiculous in societies where Christians have special privileges to indoctrinate children
More pro-polygamy affidavits by Mormon fundamentalists filed in Canadian constitutional case set to begin in November
Judge will allow anonymous testimony from Mormon polygamists in Canadian constitutional case on polygamy
Mormon polygamists seek immunity from future prosecution before giving evidence in Canadian constitutional case
Canadian constitutional case on polygamy triggered by Mormon fundamentalists, but will also examine Muslim communities
Utah law professor uses Mormon polygamists as example of how religious extremism leads to deliberate child abuse
Polygyny and Canada’s Obligations under International Human Rights Law (pdf)
Research paper submitted to B.C. court in constitutional case documents harms associated with polygamy
Man from Bountiful says girls in Mormon polygamist communities "treated like poison snakes", taught to obey men and have many children
Bountiful evidence that polygamy harms women and children - constitutional case likely to reach Canadian Supreme Court
Review of the positions 12 intervener groups are expected to take in upcoming Canadian constitutional case on polygamy
Some religious practices, such as polygamy, are inherently harmful and should not be tolerated in modern society
Women's adovcates: polygamy is an “oppressive institution” that abuses and enslaves women and children
Prosecuting Polygamy in El Dorado by Marci Hamilton
Senate Judiciary Committee Holds Hearings on Polygamy Crimes: What Needs to Be Done at the Federal Level to Protect Children from Abuse and Neglect
Senate hearing: "Crimes Associated with Polygamy: The Need for a Coordinated State and Federal Response."
Texas Will Attempt to Show That Polygamist Culture Itself Harms Children
FLDS defendants complain their religious freedom violated, while denying religious freedom to their children
Children in Bountiful have religious rights too, but are denied them by parents claiming religious freedom
Some Canadian children are protected from religion-related abuse, while others are not
Polygamy is not freedom
When the trial opened on November 22, 2010, a stream of participants and witnesses for the government, including representatives from the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children, REAL Women of Canada, the Christian Legal Fellowship, and academic experts, testified about the many harms associated with polygamy. Most convincing, perhaps, was the testimony of former FLDS members. Carolyn Jessop, who fled a community in Utah with her eight children in the middle of the night, summed it up well: “Polygamy is not pretty to look at. It is nice that it is tucked away in a dark corner where nobody has to see its realities, because it’s creepy.”
But George Macintosh, the amicus curiae (friend of the court) appointed to present the opposing argument, came out swinging. He characterized Section 293 as an overly broad and grossly disproportionate law rooted in Christian prejudices, a law demeaning to polygamists. Women in polygamous marriages anonymously testified that they were happy, that they’d made the right decision. According to CBC, the BC Civil Liberties Association argued that “consenting adults have the right — the Charter protected right — to form the families that they want to form.” And the Canadian Association for Free Expression maintained that the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2005 strengthened the individual’s right to enter a polygamous marriage.
The rights argument carries considerable weight in a liberal society — if it didn’t, we wouldn’t still be faced with the Bountiful problem. We’ll find out what the court makes of it all by the end of the year. Something that hasn’t been fully considered but should be factored in to any reasonable decision is that rights can’t be separated from the culture in which they arise. They are inextricably linked to institutions that form the backbone of a society, and in every society throughout history the fundamental organizing institution has always been marriage.
One of the oldest extant marriage documents comes from ancient Babylonia, in the reign of Ammi-ditana (1683–1640 BC): the dowry register for Sabitum, daughter of Ibbatum, who gave her as wife into the house of Ilšu-ibni, for his son Warad-Kubi. Sabitum’s dowry consisted of two beds, two chairs, one table, two chests, one grindstone, one grindstone for flour, one ten-litre container, and one emptyšikkatum jar. In return, Ibbatum received ten silver shekels, and he tied that money into the fringe of Sabitum’s dress to be given back to Warad-Kubi. From the beginning, it seems, marriage has been a financial agreement, a way of distributing resources.
But it has not been exclusively monogamous. In old Babylonia, for example, the marriage contract might include a stipulation for polygamy; Warad-Kubi may have taken more wives than Sabitum. (This arrangement is more precisely called polygyny, but because the alternative form of polygamy — one wife with many husbands — is so rare, the distinction is rarely made.) While polygamy would never be the primary form of marriage — as Bountiful illustrates, huge segments of the male population would be out of luck — it was certainly widespread. And it’s clear that it provided unique advantages.
Polygamy acted as husbandly insurance against an individual wife’s barrenness, as well as high child mortality rates, and made ill or aging wives less burdensome. If it was taboo to have sex with pregnant and lactating women (which increased a nursing child’s chances of survival), new fathers suffered neither sexual privation nor a waiting period to produce another child. And with so many children, polygamists had plenty of sons to work the land or contribute to their commercial ventures; in militaristic societies, these sons were prized as military recruits. Daughters, less valued, were still useful for domestic work, or to be advantageously married off to polygamous men.
Of course, polygamy is entrenched in another ancient institution, patriarchy, and in this context of women’s assumed dependence it actually offered them certain protections. Consider Sabitum again: She was very unlikely to try to leave her husband — if she did, she was to be tied up and drowned. If he renounced her, he was to pay her a small lump sum, but in the absence of any kind of social safety net she would essentially be left destitute. If he died, she was in even worse shape. The expandable nature of the polygamous union meant there was a better chance another man would take her in. It also meant men were less likley to renounce unwanted, old, sick, or barren wives in the first place; even if they were shunted aside in favour of younger, healthier women, they at least remained married. (Polygamy was particularly useful in wartime, when there were fewer eligible men.) Co-wives would typically share a residence or compound, co-operating in household duties, including raising one another’s children. To overworked women who dreaded the sexual relations that could result in yet another pregnancy, the arrangement might have seemed like a godsend.
And yet it could also very easily succumb to ever-simmering tensions and jealousies. This was especially true with regard to children, rivals for their father’s attention and resources, and whose interests each mother attempted to promote at the expense of the other children. In all but the wealthiest households, supporting so many adults and offspring was a strain on the patriarch, and some of his dependents inevitably lost out. Moreover, an unhappy woman had little choice but to endure her lot; even if the prospect of single life seemed preferable, she would be forced to leave her children behind, possibly with an angry father and vindictive co-wives. Being trapped in this way meant there was always tremendous potential for injustice in the polygamous union.
Islam, which permits but does not prescribe polygamy, tacitly acknowledges that potential with guidelines. “Marry such women as seem good to you, two and three and four,” it says in Surah 4:3 of the Koran, “but if you fear that you will not do justice (between them), then (marry) only one or what your right hands possess; this is more proper, that you may not deviate from the right course.” The sacred text also limits wives to four, no two sisters at the same time, and even then warns, “You will never be able to do perfect justice between wives even if it is your ardent desire, so do not incline too much to one of them (by giving her more of your time and provision) so as to leave the other hanging,” so that she feels neither married nor divorced (Surah 4:129).
Islamic polygamy remains strongly rooted in places like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Mali, and Nigeria. In West Africa, the continent’s most polygamous region, an estimated 40 percent of all marriages are polygamous. It’s therefore not surprising that a burgeoning immigrant polygamous community can be found in Canada. Immigration officials don’t generally admit multiple wives, but there are reports that religious leaders in Toronto and Ottawa are performing polygamous marriages. One imam from Scarborough, who spoke recently with the Canadian Press, estimates there are some 200 such marriages in the Greater Toronto Area alone. In a 2007 Maclean’s article, several Muslim immigrant women explain that polygamy solves certain problems, such as a wife’s barrenness or even her time of the month: “Rather than a man getting into a wrong thing in dating women and bringing a sickness — AIDS and all that,” one says, “better he should marry [additional wives].” But while a Muslim leader from Mississauga insists Canada should allow polygamy (“We should respect different people”), the immigrant community has been conspicuously silent during the BC trial, most likely because it doesn’t want to further compromise its position in a country that has, like others in the West, summarily rejected polygamy.
While early Christian patriarchs were polygamous — the Biblical King Solomon, with 700 wives, spectacularly so — the Church gradually renounced the practice, largely because Greco-Roman culture happened to prescribe monogamy. Christians born into the monogamous tradition explained away the Old Testament’s stories about polygamy as a fast track to fulfill God’s instructions to populate the world when it had fewer people, and theologians eventually made it official. In chapter 7 of On the Good of Marriage, AD 401, St. Augustine wrote, “Now indeed in our time, and in keeping with Roman custom, it is no longer allowed to take another wife.”
As with polygamy, women’s subordinate status shaped this version of marriage; wives had no legal status apart from their husbands, and vowed to serve and obey them in return for protection and support. Privileged men could indulge in romantic, erotic love affairs with mistresses, flaunting them as a polygamist would an appealing new wife, without greatly damaging their marriages or their wives’ status. Their resources (and, postmortem, their estates) remained the inheritance of their wife’s children; their illegitimate children had no claims at all. Monogamy seldom provided fathers with a large pool of potential workers, but then slavery and serfdom made for good substitutes.
By about 1300, Christianity had spread across Europe, and despite pockets of resistance — the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, for instance — installed monogamy along with it. Little changed until, in the eighteenth century, the Western world was rocked by the combined force of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. While philosophers and political thinkers challenged age-old assumptions about authority, industry created a resource-rich middle class, which increasingly populated cities, where word spread quickly: the divine right of kings had given way to the notion of universal rights to life, liberty, and property.
These new ideas ultimately altered the balance of power between men and women, and transformed society and marriage, its core institution. The family’s control over its children’s marriages was increasingly tempered by a regard for individual preferences, and the idea of marrying for love gained momentum. Love would provide companionship, emotional satisfaction, and, most important, an end to the cruelty that marked so many marriages. Women saw love as the lifeline to a decent life, an assurance that they would be treated respectfully by their husbands. As a result, many resisted marrying until they inspired love (and not just interest in their dowries) in a prospective husband. In a journal entry dated March 6, 1830, for instance, Upper Canadian Mary Gapper reported that she’d agreed to marry Edward O’Brien only after concluding that she would gain “the possession of a heart capable of entering into all my views and feelings and attached to me with an affection so exactly suited to my humour that I sometimes almost fancy that I must myself have dictated it.”
But as love and marriage became increasingly linked in the popular mind, so did the idea of ending loveless marriages — a significant peril of this new incarnation of monogamy. For the profoundly religious, dissolving a marriage isn’t an option, but by the nineteenth century the traditional authority of Christian churches had declined significantly, and divorce became a legal rather than a moral issue. In 1857, the British Matrimonial Causes Act made divorce available to Canadian women, but only if they could prove adultery coupled with perverse or cruel behaviours such as bigamy, incest, or bestiality, and even then only by act of Parliament. A small cohort of women seeking divorce ventured south of the border, where it had been widely available by mid-century. Over the next few decades, however, incremental reforms to Canadian property law gave married women the right to retain their own wages and eventually, by 1884, to manage and dispose of their own property. The conditions under which departing wives could gain custody of their children were also expanding, and by 1887 the court was basing its decisions on the best interests of the children and the condition of both parents. In 1968, Canada passed the Divorce Act, with provisions for no-fault divorce and universal access to spousal support. By making it feasible for women to leave, divorce law had effectively liberalized marriage.
Meanwhile, a great deal of liberal infrastructure was developing around the concept of monogamy. Take personal income tax: first levied in 1917 to finance the First World War, it became the welfare state’s greatest source of revenue, and the calculation always assumed monogamy, simply because that was the only legal form of marriage. Single men were presumed to need less money and were taxed 4 percent on all income over $1,500, while married men were entitled to an exemption on the first $3,000, enabling them to support two-person family units. Today, the basic personal exemption ($10,382 for 2010) applies equally to all, but tax benefits and credits are calculated according to marital status, which of course still means one spouse or none. And the same basic configuration has shaped most modern benefit programs: social assistance, Employment Insurance, Old Age Security or the Canadian Pension Plan, private health insurance, and pensions.
It is in this context that polygamy has come to seem an abomination. Except for a few isolated cases, it was rare until the sudden appearance of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 1830s. Joseph Smith was living in Pennsylvania when an angel named Moroni revealed to him the location of a set of buried golden plates engraved with sacred text, which he then translated using seer stones and published inThe Book of Mormon. God also told him that in order to be “exalted” in the afterlife, certain leaders should marry more than one woman and have many children. Smith obeyed, marrying a succession of women, many of them teenagers or the wives of other men. He might have got away with it, but he decided to run for president in 1844, and was eventually murdered by an armed mob. His successor, Brigham Young, led the Mormons to the isolated frontier of Utah, but the government wasn’t about to forget about them. In 1878, a year after Young died, having “sealed” with or married fifty-six women who collectively bore him fifty-seven children, the US Supreme Court criminalized polygamy. Canada followed suit twelve years later with Article 278 of the Canadian Criminal Code, which outlawed “what among the persons commonly called Mormons is known as spiritual or plural marriage.”
To save their church and their hides, most members of the Church of Latter-day Saints officially renounced polygamy, but a small breakaway group of ex-Mormons, the FLDS, established polygamous communities in remote areas of Utah, Arizona, Texas — and, in 1946, Lister, BC. Not only was the town remote from “gentile” society, but its founders also assumed that the Canadian government, which had been recruiting badly needed settlers from persecuted European sects such as the Hutterites and Doukhobors, would keep its distance. Later, polygamous men in the US who struggled to support huge households flocked to Lister, where they could rely on help from the state: their Canadian(ized) wives were eligible for free medical care, daycare subsidies, and eventually the Old Age Pension. As soon as the women were impregnated, their status as technically single mothers also entitled them to claim welfare assistance and other child benefits, a practice known as “bleeding the beast.” By the early 1980s, several hundred members lived in the community, including Winston Blackmore, one of the thirty-one children of Ray Blackmore, an early bishop of Lister. On assuming the mantle in 1984, Winston renamed it Bountiful.
There is something unsavoury about a smug patriarch like Winston Blackmore taking advantage of Canada’s liberal institutions, but isn’t that bad taste the best test of our commitment to liberalism? Rights advocates are accustomed to holding their noses. When a human rights complaint was brought against Alberta pastor Stephen Boissoin for a viciously homophobic letter to the editor published in the Red Deer Advocate in 2002, a spokesman for the gay rights group Egale responded, “When that opinion is vehement and hurtful, it’s even more challenging to defend the right of that opinion to be expressed… [But] support his right, we must. If Boissoin was no longer able to share his views, then who might be next in also having their freedom of expression limited.” And, by the same token, a handful of conservative Christians have advocated for civil same-sex marriage. So why shouldn’t we find a way to advocate on behalf of Winston Blackmore in his struggle to practise polygamy unhindered, on the grounds of religious freedom? Why not, in fact, open up marriage to polygamists by legalizing the right to engage in it?
In answering that question, it’s useful to imagine for a moment doing so. Among all the benefits programs we would have to overhaul, perhaps the most satisfying would be welfare, since we could prevent the wives of Bountiful from “bleeding the beast.” This would entail creating a system to accurately assess household income in a family with multiple earning spouses, as well as accounting for economies of scale, i.e., the second wife should be less expensive than the first, the third less expensive than the second, and so on. But exactly how much less expensive? And how would the money be divided among the wives? The same complex issues would arise in the process of adapting various benefit programs that hinge on marriage, and in all but welfare the project would be further confounded by the fact that multiple wives would cost the provider more. Consider Old Age Security: currently, a recipient’s spouse is entitled to an allowance. If that remained, the Blackmores’ household alone could collectively stand to clear more than twenty-six times the norm; on the other hand, any attempt by the government to cap benefits for legally married plural spouses would undoubtedly lead to costly constitutional challenges. When the Ontario court ruled, in 1999, that the definition of common law marriage included same-sex unions, the provincial government had to amend sixty-seven statutes, but that’s nothing compared to the nation-wide administrative crisis that would ensue if we attempted to accommodate polygamy.
The thornier issue, however, is marriage itself. The legislated definition of marriage as “the lawful union of two persons to the exclusion of all others,” was only just passed in 2005, and would be easy enough to fix by deleting the second clause. But divorce law, which is how the state promotes equality within monogamous unions, is ill equipped to do the same within polygamous ones. Provincial laws currently ensure that when two parties end a marriage, assets accumulated during the relationship are divided equally, with limited exceptions. How much of a husband’s contribution to the marital property would a departing wife receive if she had eight co-wives? One-tenth? But what if those wives appeared on the scene later or earlier — or both? Finally, what, if any, of theircontribution would she have a right to? The women didn’t marry each other; they married their husband. And that’s why it would not only be infinitely complicated to apply divorce law to polygamy; it would never meet Western liberal standards of fairness. A husband could always dilute his wife’s stake in the family assets by unilaterally deciding to marry another wife.
American legal scholar Adrienne Davis, who believes that conventional family law rooted in monogamous marriage may not be up to attempts at cobbling polygamous marriage onto it, points out an alternative: commercial partnership law. Typically used when two or more parties go into business, according to Davis it would certainly address “polygamy’s central conundrum: ensuring fairness and establishing baseline behaviour in contexts characterized by multiple partners, on-going entrances and exits, and life-defining economic and personal stakes.” Of course, there would be a huge administrative cost to both adapting the model to marriage, and to ensuring that over the course of a union all partners consented to any new additions to it and renegotiated their respective rights as the landscape changed. More to the point, however, this is not what polygamists want, and it’s not what we want. Remember, liberal marriage was built on the concept of love; it’s hard to imagine a way of squaring this with the filing of an annual marriage report.
In our longing to ensure that everyone enjoys every possible right, we have been willing to stretch our imaginations, swallow our bile, and give polygamy a chance. That is no less than our values demand of us. But legalizing it is not ultimately in the same category as granting a pastor the right to express his loathing of homosexuality, or as legalizing gay marriage. While much has been made, in particular, of the parallel between sanctioning same-sex unions and sanctioning polygamy, not least by Blackmore himself (at one point, he went so far as to suggest that the marriage of one of his Canadian wives with an American wife was proof of his support for gay marriage, and not a ploy to outfox immigration regulations), the outcomes couldn’t be more different. The former brought people into an existing system of rights; the latter poses a significant threat to that system. And that’s probably our cue, as a liberal society, to hold our noses and draw the line.
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Elizabeth Abbott has written six books, including A History of Marriage (2009) and A History of Mistresses (2003). Sugar: A Bittersweet History was shortlisted for the 2009 Charles Taylor Prize.
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The author asks: "So why shouldn’t we find a way to advocate on behalf of Winston Blackmore in his struggle to practise polygamy unhindered, on the grounds of religious freedom?"
ReplyDeleteBecause religious freedom means much more than the freedom of polygamists to practice their religion. The religious polygamists' spokespersons in the Canadian constitutional case, their lawyers, and the other lawyers making the religious freedom argument in this case are all either ignorant about the concept or purposely ignoring the full scope of that freedom. Two main aspects they are leaving out of their arguments are: 1) that religious freedom also includes the right to be free from religion and; 2) that children also have the right to religious freedom, granted both by international law and the Canadian constitution. Without those two elements of religious freedom that right is a meaningless, empty right.
A child's right to freedom of conscience, thought and belief is obviously connected to that same right they will have as an adult. However, if they are effectively indoctrinated as a child so that they cannot exercise their own religious freedom, either as a child or later as an adult, then their own right to religious freedom has been denied to them. Obviously, parents also have a right to religious freedom, but that right does not allow them to deny that same right to others, including their own children.
Children have some rights that they are entitled to as children, and some rights they are entitled only later when they reach a certain age or become adults. Voting, for example, is a political right that they will enjoy when they reach the eligible age, so in that sense it is a future right. Religious freedom for children is both a right they enjoy as children and a future right they have as adults. That right when they are children can only be interfered with by parents or guardians in keeping with the evolving capacities of the children. All children have a right to an open future. Parental rights to religious freedom do not grant them the right to interfere with their children's religious freedom and right to an open future.
The only way to protect the adult right to religious freedom is to protect that same right for children.