Polygamy: freedom of religion or a violation of the law?

The Canadians are watching the Texas polygamy case with great interest, according to Michael Smyth writing in The Province. 

For more than 60 years, the polygamist commune at Bountiful in the Interior [in British Columbia] has been allowed to freely operate in the face of Canada’s laws against men taking multiple wives.

The secretive Mormon sect is home to an estimated 1,000 people. A long succession of B.C. governments has made a series of ultimately empty threats against its fundamentalist leaders.

One reason they haven’t acted, says Smyth, is because of the problem of what to do with the wives and children.

The Americans knew what they were getting into. They knew they would have to deal with displaced and terrified women and kids. But they were determined to deal with the polygamist leaders, anyway.

In that regard, American lawmakers are showing more guts and determination than us.

The Canadian officials would like to prosecute on the basis of sexual exploitation or sexual assault. For that they need a complainant, and they don’t have one. So why not prosecute the violation of the law against polygamy, in effect for 100 years? Here’s why:

If the Bountiful leaders were charged with polygamy, their defence would surely be a constitutional claim of freedom of religion.

Lawmakers are worried such a defence would succeed, and not just because it would mean what the fundamentalist Mormons are doing is legal. The breakaway Mormons are just a small group.

No, the bigger concern is how Muslim groups would interpret such a court ruling.

Many Muslim countries openly practice polygamy, though Canada does not allow Muslim immigrants to bring in multiple wives.

If the Bountiful leaders won in court, what’s to stop Muslim groups from demanding recognition of their polygamist marriages and suing to have their multiple wives and children allowed into the country?

There you have it. We’ve seen how eager some Muslims are to bring Sharia law to other countries. And we’ve read of many instances of Muslim immigrants practicing polygamy in the United States (and Canada), sometimes out of sight of the authorities and sometimes in full view.  Previous RRW posts on polygamy are here, here and here, or search for “polygamy” in our search function.

The Texas polygamists are being charged with child abuse, as far as I can tell. They could be prosecuted for statutory rape and child molestation too. But polygamy is illegal in the United States, so presumably they could be charged with that.

At some point the government needs bring a case against a polygamist, and win. This will take careful preparation, since, as Smyth writes, the polygamists will invoke religious freedom. This has already been decided, when Mormon polygamists were forced to end the practice as a condition for Utah becoming a state. But nowadays everything is up for renegotiation, it seems. Whether we can successfully prosecute is a test of whether we value our civilization at all, or if multiculturalism extends to every barbaric practice conceivable.  

It is very bad for our society — not to mention the women and children involved – to have polygamous famlies among us, tacitly allowed to follow their practices. Muslim polygamy is worse for our society than these cults, because it is more visible and represents tacit acceptance of the practice as long as it is not prosecuted, and because it threatens to become more widespread if permitted. Alternatively, I suppose immigrant polygamists could be deported, which would also send a strong message. One way or the other, polygamy is something we need to deal with.