Polygamy and troubling signs of civilizational suicide

Gag, but didn't I open up my National Post on Saturday to read this story that put a positive spin on the polygamous lifestyles of Bountiful, B.C.

McGill University law professor Angela Campbell does not endorse polygamous practice. She "has no love for Winston Blackmore," even if he is more laid back and more approachable than Mr. Oler, who represents the more conservative of Bountiful's two polygamous religious factions. Both are "problematic people," she says.

But she doesn't get too worried about them, or what goes on inside Bountiful.

Prof. Campbell is one of the few outsiders - and a secular, inquisitive, intellectual one at that - to have a well-informed opinion of the place, based on first-hand observation and experience. She has enjoyed direct, almost unfettered access to the women of Bountiful.

About 1,000 people live in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints community. It is next to Creston, B.C., near the U.S. border.

Prof. Campbell has spent some of the past two summers in Creston and Bountiful, conducting research and interviewing women who call themselves "sister wives."

"It's a fascinating, amazing place," she says. "It's complicated. It's very diverse."

More than many would imagine. She met two ladies who, besides being married in the "celestial" Bountiful sense to Mr. Blackmore, are married, in the state-sanctioned legal manner, to each other.

Prof. Campbell has also encountered in Bountiful monogamous marriages. Even a traditional wedding that, she says, seemed "right out of the pages of a bridal magazine."

Preconceptions she had before her trip to Bountiful were shattered.

Prof. Campbell must, like so many today, have had her brain steeped in John Stuart Mill or some other kind of "harms" analysis that is so myopic and relativist that my jaw is hanging open and the word "Nincompoop!" springs to mind.

So, maybe the women she interviewed at Bountiful think their arrangements are just hunky dorey, but what about the children? Imagine being the son of a father who has 100 kids. Does he even know his name, let alone his birthday? Sure you can really probe the dark side of a society by spending a couple of summers in a place.

What happens to the second tier of men who don't get to marry in such a society?

No one ever asks a child whether the arrangements of his or her parents are going to be beneficial in the long run. What about the harm to wider society?

Last year, I worried that various organizations engaged in promoting a culture of life in the public square were NOT getting their arguments together to form an apologetic against polygamy. I feared that it was coming down the track like the shining light that is not the end of the tunnel but an approaching train. But I'm a journalist, not an activist, so it was not my place to organize anything.

There are big fears that charges against polygamists will not survive a religious freedom challenge. Why? Because judges may respect religious freedom, but they tend to see all religions as equal, as a bunch of mystical hodge podge that is basically irrational.

What's rational comes out of the Enlightenment they argue, as if everything rational is a break from the Christian faith, from which the Enlightenment stole many ideas and debased others.

As Denyse O'Leary once put it to me, people put the Catholic faith--which she said is supremely rational--on a par with the green apple worm cult.

Argggghhhhh! It's true. This is the kind of reasoning that gives Satanists the right to have a shrine on a submarine. Religious freedom, you know?

This is why what Archbishop Raymond Burke said recently in the United States is so important to grasp and work from if we want to regain an apologetic that defends the marriage against such insults as polygamy.

He said, (my bolds):

According to the proportionalist way of thinking, each of us has the right to choose what are the most important moral issues. Ultimately, it lacks any relationship to the objective truth of actions. It fails to realize that unless the fundamental moral goods are safeguarded, that is, human life and the sanctuary of marriage, other moral issues, while having an importance, lose their ultimate meaning. In such a way of thinking, for instance, one can accept a program of universal health care, even if it includes the compulsory provision of abortion and the rationing of health care to the benefit of those considered to be "productive," while providing for the hastening of death for the aged, the weak and those with special needs, that is, for those considered to be "unproductive," according to the reasoning of whoever has political power.

In this regard, I find the language of values to be less than adequate to our moral discourse. Although I know it is common to speak of moral values, we must remember that the language of values, which comes to us from the world of economics, usually expresses a relative assessment of worth. What is a value to me may not be a value to another. What is really at stake are objective goods, created by God and participating in His own goodness, like human life and the union of man and woman in marriage. They are good in themselves, no matter how I may view them. Only when I am able to view them as they are, according to God's plan, am I able to do what is right and good. Only then I find happiness in a right relationship with others and with the world.

We used to have civilizational confidence because we knew that our laws and our founding principles had some relationship to these objective goods, because they were part and parcel of our Judeo-Christian tradition.

Now we are slipping off those foundations into nincompoopery elevated as wisdom and common sense grounded in natural law demoted to some kind of phobia.

We're told that if we mention God at all, we are going to be ignored and marginalized.

Sigh.

Even mentioning natural law, without talking about God, also tends to get one ignored or marginalized.

But just because we live in a society of Millsian nincompoops who think only of individuals and whether they think they are harmed, and who never seem to think of the harms to society as a whole, to the common good, or to children and their future prospects does not mean that objective reality has gone away.

Someone has to be sane enough to speak up for it.