Polygamy does not abuse make

Canada’s Justice Minister speaks out about Canadian values and polygamy. Via CTV.ca: Polygamy has 'no place in Canada': justice minister:

The federal justice minister says polygamy has "no place in Canada," after calls for clarity on the issue from the British Columbia attorney general.

"The prohibition on polygamy is certainly consistent with Canadian values," Justice Minister Rob Nicholson told reporters Friday at a news conference

He said the federal government is prepared to defend the law, which prevents people from being married to more than one person at one time.

His comment comes the day after B.C.'s attorney general said Canadians and the justice system need clarity on whether or not polygamy is a crime.

On Thursday, the B.C. government said it decided to seek an opinion rather than appeal a court ruling that quashed polygamy charges against Winston Blackmore and James Oler. Both are leaders of breakaway sects of the Mormon Church in Bountiful, B.C. The mainstream church banned polygamy more than 100 years ago.

Blackmore was accused of having 19 wives and Oler three.

The charges were dropped because B.C.'s attorney general did not have the jurisdiction to appoint a second special prosecutor to consider charges against the men

On Thursday, Joe Arvay, the lawyer for Blackmore said his client wants to participate in the hearing, to make sure the court hears his side of the story. Lawyers for Blackmore and Oler argue the law is a violation of their charter rights to religious freedom.

At the news conference, Nicholson said the law is constitutional and complies with both the charter and the Canadian bill of rights.

"The prohibition on polygamy is consistent with Canadian values and I am confident it'll pass constitutional muster," Nicholson said.

He would not elaborate on what argument the federal government will be presenting in court to defend the law.

One constitutional law professor says that even if polygamous marriages do end up allowed, they may still pose legal problems.

"It would mean that those religious sects that use polygamy as their marriage form could go ahead and do it religiously but it would not make the marriage legal," Beverley Baines, a law professor at Queen's University told Canada AM.

The province will specifically ask the B.C. Supreme Court if the law barring polygamy is consistent with the charter and will also ask what role the law has in governing relationships between consenting adults and relationships with youth.

There have been allegations in Bountiful that teenage girls have been married to middle-aged men, and that some have been sent to the United States to marry older men in sister sects there.

"It's very crucial that the women involved in polygamous relationships...are given an opportunity to testify," said Baines.

The RCMP have launched numerous investigations into Bountiful since 1990, but prosecutors have repeatedly shied away from laying charges.

Read the rest here.

Now, I realize that I may be in the minority here, but I’m Canadian, and I’m not against polygamy. Not that I don’t realize that polygamy has its problems in common practice: the degradation or devaluing of women; a sort of hyper-chauvinism; the marrying off of young girls to older men, sometimes relatives; the gaming of government payment systems. And all of this is generally tied in to some sort of extreme religious practice, such as the Bountiful creeps, or the occasional Mohammadan in Ontario.

But here’s the thing. All of these, frankly, horrible, unsettling things are not one and the same with polygamy. To condone polygamy does not mean to condone woman and child abuse. That was the main problem ( for me ) with the Bountiful attempted prosecutions, because they were focusing on the polygamy, not on the child abuse, or the shipping of women over the border from colony to colony. Polygamy was just the thing that the authorities could try to nail Bountiful with, and so they gave it a shot, it didn’t work, and now polygamy has, even further, become the issue instead of the real evil of groups like Bountiful.

It’s not about polygamy. It’s about abuse. And we need to make that distinction or else we’re just wasting our time.