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[Polygamy] Will it legally stand or fall before the charter
SmallLady
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
From the Globe and Mail this afternoon.
Weigh in D&D. Is it Right? Wrong? icky?
if it's right, under what circumstances?
if it's wrong, will it hold up under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? (or the laws of your home country)
if it's Icky, what part of it makes you feel that way?
Polygamy charges in Bountiful
ROBERT MATAS AND WENDY STUECK
Globe and Mail Update and The Canadian Press
January 7, 2009 at 4:15 PM EST
VANCOUVER — Leaders of the two factions in the polygamous community of Bountiful have been charged under the Criminal Code with practising polygamy.
In a sensational turn in a 20-year-old debate over the issue of polygamy in Canada, police have charged Jim Oler and Winston Blackmore.
The two men were charged each with one count on Tuesday and have not yet appeared in court. Mr. Oler is charged with “practising polygamy†with two women. Mr. Blackmore's charge relates to 20 women.
The religious community has been the subject of several police probes since the late 1980s following allegations of incest, sexual abuse, fraud, and trafficking of teenage brides across the Canada-U.S. border. But police up to this point have refused to proceed with charges.
“This has been a very complex issue,†said B.C. Attorney-General Wally Oppal. “It's been with us for well over 20 years. The problem has always been the defence of religion has always been raised.â€
Mr. Oppal said some legal experts have believed that the charge wouldn't withstand a Charter of Rights challenge over the issue of freedom of religion.
“I've always disagreed with that,†he said. "Our belief is that it is a valid section [of the Criminal Code]."
"Hopefully it won't be a long trial," Mr. Oppal added, saying it was premature to say when a trial may take place.
The two Bountiful leaders are expected to be released from custody today on conditions that include they not perform marriages.
RCMP Sgt. Tim Shields said he's not aware any of the wives were under 18.
Mr. Blackmore was considered the bishop in Canada of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints from 1984 until 2002, when he was replaced by Mr. Oler. He is reported to have more than 20 wives and dozens of children. In an exchange of e-mails with The Globe and Mail earlier this year, Mr. Blackmore said he had no legal wives but lots of family members.
Mr. Blackmore also said he acts in his capacity as a religious minister when called upon by others but he was neither a member of a FLDS congregation nor a leader of any religious community. He has previously said he was part of a sect called the United Order Effort, which he has described as the true Mormon church.
Mr. Oler, who has been more reluctant to speak with the media than Mr. Blackmore, is reported to have fewer wives.
Mr. Oppal had previously indicated he would like to see charges of polygamy laid against members of the community despite concerns raised by two government advisers about the difficulty of obtaining a conviction in the face of protections for religious freedom guaranteed under the Charter of Rights and Freedom.
Vancouver lawyers Richard Peck and Len Doust in separate opinions advised the government to seek a court ruling on whether the law on polygamy conflicts with the Canadian Charter before charging anyone.
Undeterred, Mr. Oppal sought advice a third time. The opinion of the adviser, Vancouver lawyer Terry Robertson, has not yet been released although his review was to be completed last fall.
Last summer, Mr. Robertson told The Globe and Mail he intended to ask the RCMP to reopen its investigation into the polygamous community to find out whether men in authority fathered children with underage girls.
Polygamy is an indictable offence in the Criminal Code.
"Is the spirit of the law being violated and we think it is. If some court decides otherwise, we will obviously have to live with that," Mr. Oppal said when asked about the risk of losing court.
Bountiful is a community of more than 1,000 people in a rural area outside Creston, B.C., in southeastern B.C. a few kilometres north of the Canada/U.S. border.
The news conference comes two weeks after the release of a report on the unprecedented raid on April 3 on the central compound and headquarters for the religion, the Yearning For Zion ranch in Eldorado, Texas.
Welfare authorities concluded that 12 of 439 children who were seized during the raid were underaged child brides. Seven of the girls, who were between the ages of 12 and 15, had one or more children.
An additional 262 children were considered to be neglected because parents did not remove them from situations that exposed them to sexual abuse, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
A Texas grand jury has indicted 12 men on charges including sexual assault of a child, aggravated sexual assault, bigamy and conducting an illegal marriage, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
The raid led to the largest child welfare apprehension in U.S. history.
Weigh in D&D. Is it Right? Wrong? icky?
if it's right, under what circumstances?
if it's wrong, will it hold up under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? (or the laws of your home country)
if it's Icky, what part of it makes you feel that way?
"we're just doing what smalllady told us to do" - @Heels
SmallLady on
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In a perfect world, people could practice multiple concurrent marriages out of their own free will because they really love more than one person at once.
As widely practiced today, it's a way of treating women as chattle.
Pragmatism trumps idealism.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Personally I don't see why it's not allowed.
See the post directly above yours
See also: welfare fraud. Lots of it.
See the post directly above yours
as in a 12 year old "married" with a child.
that is so very wrong.
That's neat. How does that address the problem of child and spousal abuse and welfare fraud, again?
What is your view on other forms of polygamy? Like multiple men married to a single woman? Or multiple men married to multiple women?
Because they aren't the exception with polygamy, they're the norm. This isn't a case of a few assholes fucking it up for the rest of us, it's a case of almost everyone who does this is a god damn asshole.
LoL: failboattootoot
Citation?
The issue here is basically "why are people calling themselves 'married' when that marriage is not recognized by the state?"
There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Lots of people do it; e.g., gay couples in the US.
However, if you've got a commune of adults who all just really want to be poly/swingers/etc. they're not as likely to say that they're "married" as a commune of people who are practicing some kind of fundamentalist religion where women are given from their fathers to their grooms in their late teens like livestock. Why? Because "marriage" implies obligations and telling people - especially people who are younger, of lower social status - that they're obligated to stay because they're married and their religion tells them that divorce (and, incidentally, disobedience) is wrong you can use that as a tool of psychological abuse.
Are there grey areas? Yes. Issues of spousal abuse and exploitation are always difficult and fuzzy. However, right now, anti-polygamy laws are tools that DAs use to slap additional charges on people, like Blackmore in the OP, who are clearly sleazy. When we start to see the police raiding the homes of 45-year-old poly Wiccans who are clearly just getting their freak on in midlife-crisis threesomes, then we can rethink these laws.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Example?
Polygamy is much more inherently ripe for these type of abuses.
The difference is these things are an integral part of the culture of FLDS polygamy.
The first two involve minors. Their rights are limited by default. The third one you've listed involved people who have already committed a crime.
Bit iffy to applies those types of situations to the case of polygamy in general.
Is it possible that this is because it is illegal and highly taboo, creating an environment in which only a certain type of polygamous relationship will persist?
I see. I was taking it as the more general question "should the State recognise relationships involving more than one person". My answer to that would be yes, but the type of relationships the religious whackjobs refer to as marriage wouldn't be recognised under any legal framework I can picture.
The reason, of course, would be the element of coercion involved, so if that's what we're talking about then I'm in agreement.
Well, to be fair, that has a lot to do with legal consent. In the case of polygamy, under a more open, careful system, we'd be talking about consensual adults entering into such a contract. It's a bit different.
I've heard other sensible arguments against it, though, but I'm also young, so I still like ideals.
Are you being intentionally obtuse? Those three situations are precicely why polygamy is opposed by the majority of society.
We're talking about polygamy in practice, not in some delusional fantasy world where all participants are mentally stable adults who haven't been indoctrinated into it since birth.
saint, a good example is why we criminalize prostitution. In theory (as many dipshit libertarians like to tell us), it's just a simple transaction between consenting adults. In reality, it is anything but, and as such we criminalize it to prevent the many abuses rife in the system. The move now isn't to legalize it, but to shift the burden of punishment from the sex workers (who quite often are forced into the trade and have no choices) to the johns who help perpetuate the system.
The whole thing could be compared to the porn industry discussion that took place a little while ago. There is abuse to some of the porn industry workers, therefore, should the porn industry to shut down?
I hope they go after the pimps/traffickers as well... they're the real problem.
I'm actually interested to know if Nevada has a higher incidence of these problems than the other 49 states. I'm not an expert, but I feel that Res might be on to something with the idea that only nutjobs are doing it now because only nutjobs have enough conviction to buck the societal rules.
You can roughly divide all poly-whatever lifestyles into two broad categories. It's a clumsy division, I admit, but it mostly works.
First, you have the polyamorous/swinger types. Maybe they're hippies, maybe they're pagan, maybe they've read too much Heinlein, whatever. They're usually big on individual rights, nobody is owned by anybody else, etc. No, not all of these communities are lollipops and blowjobs, there's plenty of exploitation going on but it's different in quality from the kind of exploitation that goes on in group two, which are religious/traditional polygamists, who support women being married to one (usually older) man. In the former group, you might have a young girl who bunked down with a Burning Man theme camp only to be told in the middle of the night that if she doesn't put out she's just being an uptight conservative fundie cocktease. But, in general, situations like that don't involve long-term psychological manipulation and intimidation designed to keep the victim from leaving... whereas in religious polygamy, people have been conditioned from childhood to believe that this is the best life that they deserve. Or in other cases the polygamist is using cult-leader-like tactics to isolate the victim from people outside the commune and use constant psychological pressure to keep her isolated. (By the way, group two also fucks over young men, too, because when you end up having too many boys in a community, often the boys get kicked out in their late teens for stuff they didn't do and find themselves homeless on the streets of Salt Lake City and become a burden on social services.)
If stopping group two from exploiting young women also involves curtailing the rights of group one, then that's an acceptable trade-off for me. Yes, there is exploitation that happens in poly & swinger communities. I'd also be willing to accept that some religious polygamists really are doing just fine. However, the incredibly widespread anecdotes of abuse, rape, and exploitation; combined with the social isolation; and they way they treat their exiled boys all suggest to me that the good of banning polygamy outweighs the bad.
This is not a situation of the rights of the many being curtailed by the poor behavior of the few. It's a situation of the rights of the few being curtailed by the poor behavior of the many.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Hell, Las Vegas alone probably has a higher incidence of those kind of problems than most states.
I am curious what kind of tax problems this might cause, though, since if I remember correctly, marriage gives some legal benefits. Would each person in the, say, 'clump' get the legal benefits of only being married to one person, or would the benefits overlap each other for each member of the clump?
I'm not sure if I expressed that very coherently.
Face Twit Rav Gram
There go people, ruinin' things.
But does outlawing polygamy stop or even curtail those abuses? You say yourself that these abuses are happening right now to a vast extent, and polygamy is currently illegal.
Prostitution is illegal in Vegas.
That's a good line of inquiry. I don't know the answer to that.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
In most of the places where it's legal, there isn't anything there except brothels, and maybe a strip club or two. So, no, you're not going to have those sorts of problems, much like you don't have a lot of street gangs on farms.
Guys, what are "those kind of problems"?