Can we stop it? We must try

Margaret Kopala has an excellent column on polygamy in today's Ottawa Citizen.

She writes:

In December of 2005, Lorraine Johnson and Shelina Palmer got married. It was barely five months since Canada legalized same-sex marriage and even though their fundamentalist Mormon sect apparently forbade homosexual activity, the need to tie the knot was clearly urgent. Of course, three of Winston Blackmore's American-born celestial wives, mothers to 16 of his children, had been issued deportation orders earlier in the year so perhaps there was no time to waste. After all, immigration officers seemed intent on standardizing rules that already applied to Muslims trying to import wives into Canada.

As Daphne Bramham recounts in her catalytic The Secret Lives of Saints: Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada's Polygamous Mormon Sect, Lorraine and Shelina too were married to Blackmore in a religious, though not legal, ceremony. The one-time teenage brides were now fast friends but Lorraine had been part of the flood of women arriving from the U.S to become celestial brides for one of the Bountiful sect's two Canadian leaders in southeastern British Columbia. To remain in Canada as the legal spouse of Shelina, Lorraine will have to prove the marriage is not an immigration dodge Bramham suggests. In the meantime, and after years of allegations of sexual abuse, exploitation of children, trafficking of teenage brides across the Canada-U.S. border and prevarication by various B.C. attorneys general, polygamy charges were laid against Blackmore and James Oler on Jan. 7.

You have to wonder whether the tolerant, inclusive, post-modern state of which Canada is such a shining example hasn't finally managed to hoist itself on its own liberal petard. Even if the charges against Blackmore and Oler succeed (many argue they won't because of the Charter's freedom of religion provisions), Canada's same-sex marriage laws give them another option. For two women like Shelina and Lorraine who have nine of Blackmore's children between them, those laws even allow the admission of a third "parent" to the mix.

The Citizen also has a letter to the editor from one of the writers of Ottawa's gay newspapers, arguing there is nothing wrong with polygamy.

Alas, we have lost the Judeo-Christian consensus upon which our laws and our system of morality has been based. Now we have many competing over-arching narratives, and some of them have no problem welcoming polygamy or variations on group marriage, into the tent.

We must fight polygamy with every ounce of our being. It is bad for women and bad for children.

Even worse, it is bad for society and future generations.