Today, a Canadian court upheld our anti-polygamy laws, in a case I have been following pretty closely. This case centers around the polygamous group living in Bountiful, British Columbia specifically and the law has been used to try and protect young women from being forced to marry. Now obviously, I think Bountiful and everything it stands for is sick, twisted and wrong. These young girls are born and raised in a sexist and abusive culture and have very little say in who they marry. Being wife number 6 to a 79-year-old man while still in your teens is wrong by anybody’s standards (well, I guess not everyone…yeah, I’m talking to you Warren Jeffs) and by no means do I support what those crazy Mormons are doing. (On a sidenote/rant: It drives me crazy to hear the rhetoric that the Mormon church and its members are using in order to distance themselves from all this muck. Do you know how many times I’ve heard people say “They aren’t Mormon!” or deny that they are a break-off from the Mormon church? This is what Mormonism looked like 100 years ago folks, deal with it. Ahh, that feels better.)
However, I don’t know that I’m really opposed to polygamy so much. I guess this is where some of my more libertarian views come crashing into my socially democratic ones. I don’t like the government telling people who they can and can’t be with. I’m a big supporter of gay marriage and straight marriage and any other kind of marriage provided everyone within said marriage is an adult and is happy to be there. I’ve looked into this a little and it turns out there is a whole community of people living in polyamorous relationships and they don’t look anything like they do in the cults/compounds of BC. There are women living with two husbands, men living with more than one wife…every configuration you can imagine (and I’m sure a few you can’t). They aren’t hurting anyone and if they want to have two husbands God help them that’s their choice.
Surely there are already laws in place to protect adult men from marrying under-aged girls several times over. I mean, really. If not then there should be. I’m just not sure that it should ban polygamy outright. There are days when a sister-wife would come in pretty handy.
Hi there! I added you to my reader a month or so ago, after some stuff blew up in the intersection of feminist and atheist spaces online (the whole elevator thing with SkepChick). A lot of the stuff I was seeing was, “Hey, atheists, if you want to treat women well then do these things.” But it wasn’t really addressing how to deal with moms, as in make atheist spaces welcoming and positive for women who have kids, which is a sizable number! So I thought: I can’t be the only atheist/feminist mom out there, and I found you. Happy day.
Even happier that I saw you post something about this case, as I’ve been watching it a little too (even though I’m in the US) – I’m in a set of polyamorous relationships. I won’t go into the legal frustrations of those in poly relationships – I just wanted to say it’s really nice to find a place online where I don’t feel like I have to read something and be thinking, “Yes, but…” the whole time because one aspect or another of my identity is threatened or trivialized even as others are celebrated. :)
Thanks!
I agree. The opposition to polygamy seems like mostly another weird religious hang-up to me.
As a feminist, I want to be able to say that I am pro polygamist marriage. It’s like porn, in theory, I am all for it. If people want to have sex on camera, or if people want to get 10 husbands or 10 wives, well, if everybody is on board, go for it.
But then, argh, it’s hard to explain. It’s still perpetuates values that I don’t always agree with. Usually, those women (I am talking about the traditional polygamist marriages, which is usually one man and several women) were born to live in a similar lifestyle, so do they really have a say in their choice? Do they really choose this way of life ? But again, am I making a choice based on reason about my monogamous marriage, I mean, I was raised in one, I never really questioned it either. Maybe I am the crazy one, choosing to only have one husband and no sister-wives.
As long as nobody is hurt in the process… I guess.