Culture Wars in Canada?

British Columbia is getting polygamy fever from the Americans, I’m afraid. Just to the east of Vancouver, is the lovely Creston valley, where the town of Bountiful houses a large community of polygamists (800-1,000) closely connected to the group that was recently uprooted in Texas. Polygamy is against the law in Canada and it always surprised me that this community was so deeply ensconced here. I mean, it’s not as if they were up in the northern Yukon or the Arctic Circle where nobody much was going to run into them. Bountiful is within easy driving distance from Vancouver, and the Mormon offshoot community members are pretty recognizable in their 19th Century attire; they're not in hiding.

However, what with the U.S. going on the offensive against the Texas community and removing hundreds of children from their parents’ custody, there is considerable agitation from the Vancouver Sun, as well as the public, for poor Wally Oppal, the Justice Minister, to do something, and to do it fast.

The problem for Mr. Oppall is that, although there is a law against polygamy, there is also a much bigger law in the Canadian Charter of Rights about religious freedom. The Bountiful community is arguing that the Charter protects them as long as they do not marry multiple women in ceremonies defined by Canadian law as marriage ceremonies. Furthermore, they point out, why can ordinary Canadian guys have a wife and a mistress or two, but they can’t? The offshoot-Mormons are suggesting to the rest of the folks that this is all a matter of presentation and context. ‘Lots of you have mistresses and wives; we do too, but we just call them all wives, although we legally marry only the first one. Moreover, we take care of all the ‘wives.’ Maybe even better than you take care of your mistresses.’

Ahhh, what we have here is a definitional problem? What’s the difference between a wife you don’t legally marry and a mistress you don’t legally marry? Does calling her a wife make it polygamy which is against the law, or does the law have to actually recognize her as a wife? If the offshoot-Mormons just refer to their multiple wives (and they seem to number in the tens and twenties for individual guys) as their mistresses, are the Vancouver Sun and the public no longer going to be bothered by it all?

Well, says Sun columnist Daphne Branham, who has been writing about this for several years, no: the issue is that children, and particularly girls, are being brought up in this benighted environment and are being taught that it’s okay to be one of a dozen or two wives, taught so thoroughly that it deprives them of the choice to value being the only wife, or at least the only one at one time and the only one the wife knows about. I would suggest to Ms. Branham that girls in most cultures (and boys as well) are taught their culture’s values so thoroughly that most of them have little choice to think otherwise, and thus are similarly deprived of choice. That’s what cultures mostly are there to do.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to be brought up in Bountiful or to be one of somebody’s many wives in Bountiful, but I doubt seriously that anybody is going to find a neat and consistent little argument that makes what they do in Bountiful a criminal act at the same time that it distinguishes it clearly from what lots of other people do all the time and, though we may not admire it, we don’t think it a crime. Once a girl is of age to consent to sexual conduct, then the issue is whether she consented. In Bountiful, nobody is complaining about being underage or about being forced into mistress-ship. It was such a complaint that triggered the Texas case because then child protective services could be brought into the fray, although there is apparently some evidence that this complaint itself was bogus.

Even then, though, the Texas legal case looks to be very problematic. The Texas court is currently holding hearings in which child protective services must present a plan for each of the 465 children that were taken in the raid and are currently in temporary foster care. The father of five of these children—a man excommunicated by the Texas group some years ago—testified in court the other day that no one could be a better mother to these children than their mother, his ‘spiritual’ second wife. So what’s the state’s plan for them? And the other 460 kids?

These polygamy cases make abortion seem an easy public policy question. Canadians, beware!