A rchive Date
[ 15-01-2006 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.steynonline.com/index2.cfm?edit_id=35
They're Not Queer But They're Here. Get Used To It
Steyn I-told-you-so moment
January 15, 2006
How about this story from The Toronto Star?
OTTAWA - A new study for the federal Justice Department says Canada should get rid of its law banning polygamy, and change other legislation to help women and children living in such multiple-spouse relationships...
Well, there's a surprise. I wrote about this in The Western Standard in September 2004 :
The better advocates of gay marriage are an ingenious crowd, full of artful arguments to support their claim. Initially, most of us on the other side found it hard to believe a countervailing argument was necessary, and by the time it became clear that neither "Oh, come off it, you can't be serious" nor "Well, I dunno, it just don't sound right" were going to suffice, the gays were already on their way to victory in the only arenas that matter--the media and the courts.
But the activists' intellectual rigour only goes so far. If you suggest, as some defendants of "traditional marriage" do, that gay marriage is the slippery slope to polygamy, the activists roll their eyes and go into "Oh, come off it, you can't be serious" mode. Like the chichi gay couple from New York who've built their dream home in rural Vermont, they don't want any other incomers muscling in. Gay marriage, they assure us, is the merest amendment to traditional marriage, and once we've done that we'll pull up the drawbridge.
Sorry, but it's not going to work like that... There's a very obvious constituency for polygamy, and it says something about the monumental self-absorption of the gay marriage crowd that they seem unaware of it. Indeed, it's already here. Earlier this summer, Le Monde leaked a government report revealing that polygamy was routinely practised in Muslim ghettos in France. Anecdotal evidence suggests things aren't so very different in the Islamic communities of Ontario: as The Christian Science Monitor airily put it, polygamous unions "are being performed by the same religious figures adjudicating matters under sharia"--i.e., under the province's Muslim-friendly Arbitration Act.
Another clue to what's going on comes in the invaluable British publication, Pensions News, which had an interesting item about a hitherto arcane point of law. Contracting marriage with more than one spouse simultaneously is a crime in the United Kingdom. However, if a polygamous marriage is entered into abroad in a jurisdiction permitting polygamy, that marriage is regarded as valid under English law. Hence, the interest of Pensions News. Previously, spousal inheritance was a relatively simple matter: you kick the bucket and your wife gets a big payout. Now it's relatively less simple, relative-wise: trustees of pensions funds were concerned that, under new anti-discrimination regulations which came into effect in Britain last year, they'd be obligated to pay out to more than one widow, thus doubling, trebling or quadrupling their liability. For the moment, they've been reassured that they're unlikely to have to pay full widow's benefits automatically to every relict of a polygamous marriage, but that what benefits are paid out have to be shared between all the widows.
But you see how easy it is to start talking about polygamy in a nuts-and-bolts, incremental, utilitarian, legal-harmonization, partners'-benefits, insurance-agent kind of a way. It's not a hypothetical issue: apparently many British subjects marry one spouse in Leicester or Bradford and then, while on a trip back to their homeland, marry another. Given immigration patterns in Canada and given the number of legal residents with dual citizenship, I wouldn't expect things to be so very different over here...
And, indeed, that's pretty much what's happening. As the Star's report puts it:
Canadian laws should be changed to better accommodate the problems of women in polygamous marriages, providing them clearer spousal support and inheritance rights. Currently, there's a hodgepodge of legislation across the provinces, some of whom - Ontario, for example - give limited recognition to foreign polygamous marriages for the purposes of spousal support.
And that's the point that I made in my 2004 column - that it will slip through under the guise of multiculturalism:
If the push for polygamy came from the white male elders of that breakaway Mormon sect in Bountiful, B.C., it'd be dead in the water: all you'd get from The Globe and the CBC and Maclean's would be a lot of stories about the abuse rumours, and shots of stern Old Testament patriarchs, and comments from various Grits and NDPers about how this is not compatible with "our Canadian values." If you're one of Bountiful's nubile nymphettes and you make it across the town line, you can write your own ticket on The National; they'll put you down for one of those major multi-part documentaries that takes up 52 minutes of the show for an entire week.
But, if it's not horny, stump-toothed white guys from the backwoods, what's the betting then? Once it gets all multicultural, the media back away from the in-depth investigations, happy to take the spokespersons for the relevant lobby groups at their word. If it's a Muslim who finally makes it to the Supreme Court of Canada with a polygamy case, I'd reckon their lordships will rule that forbidding it is an unwarranted restriction of charter rights. And I'd wager a few of those justices will be happy to license polygamy if only to prove that their demolition job on "traditional marriage" was legally grounded rather than mere modish solidarity.
And again that's pretty much how the Star reports it:
Chief author Martha Bailey says criminalizing polygamy, typically a marriage involving one man and several wives, serves no good purpose and prosecutions could do damage to the women and children in such relationships. "Why criminalize the behaviour?" she said in an interview. "We don't criminalize adultery. In light of the fact that we have a fairly permissive society . . . why are we singling out that particular form of behaviour for criminalization..?"
The Bailey report, consistent with other research for the project, also concludes the courts might well rule that Canada's law banning polygamy is a violation of Canada's constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion.
When I wrote my Western Standard column, eminent commentators such as Norman Spector begged to differ and Jancis M Andrews wrote to the magazine as follows:
Mark Steyn is incorrect when he forecasts that if a Muslim makes it to the Supreme Court of Canada with a polygamy case, their lordships will rule in his favour (Sept. 13, p. 53). Canada ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1976, which states that everyone has the freedom to practise their religion subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of others. Canada also ratified 2002's UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which states that polygamy contravenes womens' equality rights and also harms their children. Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that men and women are equal. Result: women three, polygamists zero.
But not for much longer. As I concluded in the Standard:
In France, where the courts uphold the central government's enforcement of French identity, polygamy will remain in the shadows. But in Canada, for years now, the philosophers of the Liberal state have acknowledged--and, indeed, even boasted--that immigration changes our country. In the cheap anti-monarchism of a John Manley or Brian Tobin, the well-worn line is that an immigrant from Latvia or China can't be expected to relate to the House of Windsor. In other words, we have accepted the principle that immigration involves not the immigrant assimilating to his new land, but his new land assimilating to him. That being so, what share of the population has to be Muslim for the prohibition on more-than-two-person marriage to be, in Manley-Tobin logic, indefensible? We're closer than you think.
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