Tag Archives: Polygamy

News

Law professor uses same-sex marriage law to argue for legalizing polygamy

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From the Los Angeles Times.

Excerpt:

Jonathan Turley is probably not the most popular man right now with supporters of same-sex marriage. The George Washington University law professor has filed a suit challenging the constitutionality of Utah’s anti-polygamy laws — and his argument is based on a landmark 2003 Supreme Court gay rights decision. That’s not good news in the view of most gay rights supporters, who don’t want their cause linked to that of polygamists any more than they want to see parallels drawn with people who engage in incest, bestiality and other taboo sexual practices.

The Utah case involves Kody Brown, his legal wife, Meri Brown, and three other “sister wives.” It’s not actually about marriage, and it doesn’t challenge the right of the state to refuse to issue wedding licenses to polygamous families. The Browns are in court because they fear they will be prosecuted.

The 2003 gay rights case, Lawrence vs. Texas, was also a criminal matter unrelated to same-sex marriage. The court overturned the conviction of two men found to have violated a state law against same-sex sodomy. But in reaching that conclusion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy offered a paean to intimate relationships defined by sexuality that easily can be transferred to the context of same-sex marriage, and potentially to polygamous marriages as well:

“The case does involve two adults who, with full and mutual consent from each other, engaged in sexual practices common to a homosexual lifestyle. The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the [Constitution’s] due process clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government.”

Kennedy emphasized in Lawrence that same-sex marriage wasn’t before the court. Similarly, in an interview with the New York Times, Turley suggested that decriminalizing polygamy will not inevitably lead to a movement for polygamous marriage.

This is what happens every time with liberal social policies like no-fault divorce, etc. First, offended victims of the mean, judgmental Christians are trotted out and sobbed over. Second, we are assured that de-criminalizing behaviors that the mean, judgmental Christians oppose will not hurt anyone. Third, Christians themselves abandon morality and support decriminalizing the behaviors because they they are more concerned about the sob stories of the “victims” than assessing the consequences of policy/law changes. Fourth, the predictable consequences of normalizing the behaviors are labeled as “unexpected” and require higher taxes and social programs to “fix”. It all starts with people who just don’t want to be told “no” – they just don’t like moral boundaries. And they don’t care who is harmed.

Commentary

Queen’s University feminist says that polygamy should be permitted

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What does feminism really mean? Is feminism compatible with traditional marriage?

Well, take a look at this post from the Vancouver Sun.

Excerpt:

A Queen’s University law professor says that polygamy should be legal in Canada.

Queen’s issued a news release on the day that a polygamy reference opened in British Columbia, where the government is seeking a legal opinion on whether Canada’s 128-year-old ban on multiple marriage violates the freedom of religion guarantees in the Charter of Rights.

Bev Baines, head of the Department of Gender Studies and a constitutional law expert, argues that Canada is a multicultural country and it is therefore unconstitutional to criminalize people for their marital relationships.

“The law achieves nothing,” Baines said in the release. “We’ve had the law on the books since 1892 and we had no prosecutions in the last 60 years aside from a  failed attempt last January. We don’t stop polygamy by having a law.”

Who is this person? Let’s read her faculty web page:

Bev Baines

Head of the Department, Undergraduate Chair

Professor Baines is one of the founders of feminist legal studies in Canada.

She recently published The Gender of Constitutional Jurisprudence (Cambridge University Press, 2004, with Ruth Rubio-Marin) in which the contributors examine constitutional cases pertaining to women in twelve countries to explain how constitutions shape and are shaped by women’s lives.

More generally, her research interests include Charter rights, human rights and judicial review. She was involved in the movement to entrench women’s equality rights in the Canadian Charter of Rights; and she continues to be a strong advocate for equity issues in Canadian universities and society.

After co-coordinating the Women’s Studies Program in the Faculty of Arts and Science between 1991 and 1993, she served as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Law from 1994 until 1997. She has also taught Law and Public Policy in the School of Policy Studies, and is now Head of the Department of Gender Studies.

This person is teaching the next generation of students her views, and is being paid to do it, (and to travel around the world), at taxpayer expense. Her research, which changes the laws of the land, is taxpayer-funded. I’m sure she means well, but I am not sure that polygamy is as good as traditional marriage is for children. And I don’t think that it’s fair to women either – women need an exclusive, life-long romantic commitment.

In Canada, polygamous Muslims can already collect multiple welfare checks for their multiple wives.

Excerpt:

Hundreds of [Greater Toronto Area] Muslim men in polygamous marriages — some with a harem of wives — are receiving welfare and social benefits for each of their spouses, thanks to the city and province, Muslim leaders say.

Mumtaz Ali, president of the Canadian Society of Muslims, said wives in polygamous marriages are recognized as spouses under the Ontario Family Law Act, providing they were legally married under Muslim laws abroad.

“Polygamy is a regular part of life for many Muslims,” Ali said yesterday. “Ontario recognizes religious marriages for Muslims and others.”

He estimates “several hundred” GTA husbands in polygamous marriages are receiving benefits. Under Islamic law, a Muslim man is permitted to have up to four spouses.

However, city and provincial officials said legally a welfare applicant can claim only one spouse. Other adults living in the same household can apply for welfare independently.

The average recipient with a child can receive about $1,500 monthly, city officials said.

Why do feminists want that?

I think the reason why feminists support polgamy is because they are hostile to traditional marriage.

Excerpt:

In 1974, the outcry grew still harsher. Ti-Grace Atkinson, a member of The Feminists and author of Amazon Odyssey, called married women “hostages.”29 Atkinson concluded:

The price of clinging to the enemy [a man] is your life. To enter into a relationship with a man who has divested himself as completely and publicly from the male role as much as possible would still be a risk. But to relate to a man who has done any less is suicide…. I, personally, have taken the position that I will not appear with any man publicly, where it could possibly be interpreted that we were friends.30

Feminism’s shrill animosity toward the married family continued beyond the 1970s. In 1981, radical feminist author Vivian Gornick, a tenured professor at the University of Arizona, proclaimed that “Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession…. The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn’t be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that.”31

Some influential feminists asserted that marriage was akin to prostitution. In 1983, radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin declared, “Like prostitution, marriage is an institution that is extremely oppressive and dangerous for women.”32 In 1991, Catherine MacKinnon, a professor of law at both the University of Michigan Law School and the University of Chicago Law School, added, “Feminism stresses the indistinguishability of prostitution, marriage, and sexual harassment.”33

Read the quotes in that article… feminists don’t like marriage!

So what would happen if people who believe in feminism wrote the laws of the land? Would they encourage people to get married and have children? Or would they pass laws and policies that encouraged people not to marry (no-fault divorce) and not to have children (high tax rates) and to make them incapable of staying married (sex education, pre-marital sex)? Is the decline of marriage, which is caused by feminism, good for children? Does it make them happy, prosperous and safe?

Is there a backlash against feminism by normal women who want husbands, marriage and children? Are they thinking hard about how to encourage men to marry and stay married? Are they heads of Gender Studies departments, writing and researching pro-marriage and pro-child laws? Do normal women vote overwhelmingly for smaller government, lower taxes, pro-male and pro-marriage policies? Are they informed about these issues? Should they be informed? Whose job is it to inform them? I guess I would like to see traditional women informing themselves and voting for limited government, and fewer research grants for feminists and other non-scientific ideologues.

(By feminism, I mean third-wave feminism)

Commentary

Why the media can’t tell the truth about why Lara Logan was attacked

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This is currently the top post on National Review.

Excerpt:

As Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer has detailed, al-Azhar University endorses a sharia manual called Umdat al-Salik. It is quite clear on the subject of women who become captives of Muslim forces: “When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled.” This is so the woman can then be made a concubine of her captor.

This arrangement is encouraged by the Koran. Sura 4:23–24, for example, forbids Muslim men from consorting with the wives of other Muslims but declares sexual open season on any women these men have enslaved. (“Forbidden to you are . . . married women, except those whom you own as slaves.”) Moreover, Mohammed — whose life Muslims are exhorted by scripture to emulate — rewarded his fighters by distributing as slaves the women of the Jewish Qurazyzah tribe after Muslim forces had beheaded their husbands, fathers, and sons. The prophet himself also took one of the captured women, Rayhanna, as his concubine. And, as Spencer further notes, Mohammed directed his jihadists that they should not practice coitus interruptus with their slaves — they were encouraged to ravish them, but only in a manner that might produce Muslim offspring.

As I documented in an earlier column, Sheikh Qaradawi contends that women bring sexual abuse on themselves if they fail to conform to Islamist conventions of modest dress. Shahid Mehdi, a top Islamic cleric in Denmark, has explained that women who fail to don a headscarf are asking to be raped, an admonition echoed by Sheikh Faiz Mohammed, a prominent Lebanese cleric, during a lecture he delivered in Australia.

In light of these exhortations, should it be any surprise that the sexual abuse of women is Islam’s silent scandal? In Europe’s expanding Muslim enclaves, it is a terror tactic to extort women — Muslim and non-Muslim — into adopting the hijab and other Islamic sartorial standards. Rape has become so prevalent, and so identifiably a Muslim scourge, that embarrassed and hyper–politically correct Swedish authorities have discouraged police in cities such as heavily Muslim Malmo from collecting data that point to Islam as the common denominator in rape reports.

This week, muslims were also implicated in terrorist attacks in the United States and in supporting polygamy in Canada.