Some arrests were finally made for polygamy this week in the B.C. community of Bountiful. Personally, I don’t have especially strong feelings either way about polygamous marriages between consenting adults (more on that later), but I was happy to see the arrests.
There has been a law on the books for over 150 years in Canada stating that polygamy is a crime. Yet it has been going on, quite openly, with nothing being done. This makes a mockery of our justice system. We need to either enforce the law, or decide that it is wrong and take it off the books. The time has finally come to do one or the other.
The two men arrested are planning to fight the law, not the charges. However, I believe that their decision to fight it on the grounds of religious freedom is a poor one. If something is really wrong – rape, murder, theft, assault – then it should not be allowed to some on the grounds of religious freedom. And if it is not wrong, then we should not be spending time and money chasing down perpetrators.
Which brings me back to the “consenting adults” issue. No matter the outcome of the polygamy trial, the fact that some of the wives were reportedly under the age of consent, and thus the victims of statutory rape, at the time of the marriages, is a separate issue. If this is the case, the men should be convicted of this, with no “religion” excuses.
Freedom of religion in our country means that a person cannot be refused a job or persecuted in some other way because he is of a “different” religion. It does not give someone freedom to commit a crime in the name of his god.
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