Daughters, less valued, were still useful for domestic work, or to be advantageously married off to polygamous men. 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. 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. And it’s clear that it provided unique advantages. While polygamy would never be the primary form of marriage - as the case of Bountiful, B.C., illustrates, huge segments of the male population would be out of luck - it was certainly widespread. In old Babylonia, for example, a marriage contract might include a stipulation for polygamy. But it has not been exclusively monogamous. 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.įrom the beginning, it seems, marriage has been a financial agreement, a way of distributing resources. But 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. The rights argument carries considerable weight in a liberal society.
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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.
Women in polygamous marriages anonymously testified that they were happy, that they’d made the right decision. He characterized Section 293 of Canada’s Criminal Code, which bans polygamy, as an overly broad and grossly disproportionate law rooted in Christian prejudices, a law demeaning to polygamists. It is nice that it is tucked away in a dark corner where nobody has to see its realities, because it’s creepy.”īut George Macintosh, the amicus curiae appointed to present the opposing argument, came out swinging. Carolyn Jessop, who fled a Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FDLS) community in Utah with her eight children in the middle of the night, summed it up well: “Polygamy is not pretty to look at. When the British Columbia government’s polygamy reference case opened at the province’s Supreme Court on November 22, 2010, a stream of participants and witnesses, 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.
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