The Religion of Polygamy

Well, although not everyone is completely satisfied by B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman's 300-+-page carefully-considered explication in defence of his ruling in defence of Canada's polygamy law, as opposed to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteeing freedom of religion, it does represent a logical decision, one that reflects Canadian values.

There has been a slow erosion of such values with the introduction through immigration of people coming from sources in Africa and the Middle East, knowingly introducing 'extended family' members such as purported cousins or sisters or other relatives to the country, who are in actual fact, part of a polygamous family situation.

Islam does permit a man to marry multiple wives. And although Islam also decrees that such men should take on the responsibility of extending their families through additional wives and children with the proviso that the men must be able to afford to support such large families, it has been seen that men gravitate to the multiple-wife attraction and disregard the affordability nuisance.

Living in Canada, those who practise polygamy have learned to hide it, and in some instances, to manipulate the system of public services such as welfare, to fund separate living quarters for disparate wives and children. But of course, pre-dating the more recent incursion of Muslim polygamous relationships there has been the fundamentalist Mormon sect in British Columbia.

Which, although the parent Mormon Church set aside polygamy as socially inappropriate in the 19th Century, a few offshoots have embraced it. These are largely men who have pedophilic tendencies, men who enjoy dominating women, and who believe they have a right to acquire as many tender young wives as possible, fathering countless children in the process.

Young girls are victimized by their fathers being complicit in the process, offering them up for marriage as soon as they become nubile, and even before they can legally do so, to men far older than they are. These are the same fathers who themselves select for their sexual gratification other men's (who are loyal to the sect) daughters.

Although men like to feel that it is their divine right to own as many females as possible, women who are coerced through custom and their lives within a rigidly cultish, quasi-religious, isolated group, have little other yardsticks of normalcy to believe in, and they submit to the will of the patriarchy. Living their cloistered, abnormal lives.

For many, fear and loathing results. Fear of the oppressive lives they live, loathing of other female contestants for the attention of a sole husband and father to the many children that result. And the young boys who grow to maturity and who represent as potential suitors for the young girls as would occur in a normal society, discover that they are persona non grata.

"Women in polygamous relationships are at an elevated risk of physical and psychical harm. They face higher rates of domestic violence and abuse, including sexual abuse. Early marriage for girls is common, frequently to significantly older men. The resultant early sexual activity, pregnancies and childbirth have negative implications for girls, and also significantly limit their socio-economic development."

Polygamy is an offence against social normalcy, against the normal maturation of the genders and their relationships. It represents an insult to the concept of gender equality. It is, above all, an offence against the children that result from these abnormal alliances, who grow up into a predestined lifestyle that curtails their most basic human rights.

Chief Justice Robert Bauman's ruling firmly set aside the notion that polygamy represents a perquisite of permissibility through religious right. It was the only decision he could have reached morally and in recognition of Canadian human rights values.