I have seen the future.

Booo!

From:

the-siobhan.livejournal.com

OFFS

From:

peristaltor.livejournal.com

Not that Blackmore's marriages are in any way legally certified.

(Fun fact: Two of his "wives" got married to each other legally. He was informed of this in a television interview. Awkward!)

From:

Also, in related idiotic news, we've found that in many thefts, DVDs are taken, so we're making DVDs illegal.

Fail Canadia.

From:

I can *kind of* see the judge's point.

Mormons: "Your ban on polygamy is an unfair infringment on our religious freedom. The specific implementation of the religious practice you're outlawing involves great harm to our members and society in general."

Judge: "Your practice involves great harm to your members and society in general. Laws restricting *your* practice of this are thus a justifiable infringment on your religious freedom"

Poly people: "But what about OUR freedom? The law also restricts us, and we don't harm society when we do this."

Judge: "This case is about if the law is just in restricting THEM from doing it THEIR WAY, not about if it's just restricting YOUR WAY. If you were the plaintiff, maybe, but you're not. Nobody is asking if the infringment on YOUR rights is justified, only if the infringement on THEIR rights is justified. And them? They're fucked up."

Edited Date: 2011-11-23 09:08 pm (UTC)

From:

granted... but:
""As Chief Justice Robert Bauman recognized, this case is about two competing visions — one of personal harm versus state intrusion. As he clearly found, there is profound harm associated with polygamy, particularly for women and children," said [B.C. Attorney General Shirley] Bond.""

That's not just making comments about religous freedom. That's making broadsweeping comments about polygamy, and the effects it has. Its two statements away from "sex with ducks" from the mouth of attorney general, not just a single page media review of a 300 page judgement...

From:

Historically and anthropologically, he's got a point: polygamy is very strongly correlated with great harm to the status of women and children.

The problem here is that the affected parties include both brainwashing cults who raise children for the purpose to selling them into sexual slavery while telling them that this is absolutely required in order to get into heaven, and sane consenting adults who want legal protections for all their life partners rather than having to choose only one.

And the judgement has ruled against the first group and caught the second in the crossfire, since the first group were the plaintiffs and the question was whether or not restricting the first group from their entire practice of polygamy, slavery and all, was justifiable.

From:

I still feel the answer is to persecute the specific harming actions, such as carnal knowledge of a minor, etc, rather than to have a blanket approach against one of their practices that overlaps those actions. In the article, most of the arguments of "this is bad" were being applied to behaviour that is incidentally related to polygamy, but actually sourced from the religious nutbaggery.

It reads like "we can't actually ban you from being Mormons and being creepy, so we'll go after the thing that makes you different".

I'm all for punching brainwashing cults in the exuberance, but I'm also not keen on blanket laws that don't actually address the problems that purport to be put in place to solve. (See our local "people are stabbing and machetteying one another, so we'll make it really hard to have ornamental swords".... Obviously).

Edited Date: 2011-11-23 09:36 pm (UTC)

From:

If it was just a coincidence that polygamy and child abuse were showing up in the same places, I'd agree with you. But I argue (see comment below) that there's a causal link. If you took a completely atheist community and convinced them that "two wives for each man, one husband for each woman" ought to be the norm, you would see similar problems emerging.

From:

Yup. The fact that this law *also* prevents non-gender-weighted non-general plural marriages is a side effect: Those people were not the plaintiffs.

From:

~~Sorry, are you arguing that child abuse comes naturally out of a multiple-adult-relationship situation?~~ woops, read comments out of order, will reply to the other one.

Edited Date: 2011-11-23 09:58 pm (UTC)

From:

It's cool, I had exactly the same reaction, and would probably have tried to bite a hole in someone or something if your comment hadn't been helpfully edited to clue me in to the fact that what was being said was not only more but different.

ETA: Much love for the phrase I'm all for punching brainwashing cults in the exuberance, by the way.

Edited Date: 2011-11-24 01:38 am (UTC)

From:

FWIW, I am actively poly myself, so I certainly wouldn't argue that :-)

But to me, what matters is that people get to make their own choices, according to a 'consenting adults' principle. FLDS-type polygamist groups offer less choice than vanilla monogamous society; the fact that the relationship they happen to enforce has some superficial similarities to the one I and my partners chose doesn't make them My Brothers In Oppression.

If anything, more like Those Arseholes Who Spoil It For The Rest Of Us.

From:

lirion.livejournal.com

The abuse that he is referencing comes about as a result of the unfair power dynamic in the situations. That dynamic isn't about multiple partners, it's about lack of choice for the women and children involved.

That's not about people choosing to have multiple partners. It's about control and some fucked up religious views. Therefore, making polygamy illegal won't stop the abuse or harm, because it's addressing the symptom not the problem.

From:

Religion certainly plays a big part, but multiple-partner relationships aren't just symptomatic here. Supply and demand - if each man needs two wives, and each woman is only allowed one husband, women become a valuable commodity and the social definition of 'women' gradually creeps downwards through the teens.

Sure, child abuse is common in a lot of religious sects, including monogamous ones. But in the ones that require polygyny without permitting polyandry, it seems to be virtually universal.

This is about one particular implementation of multi-partner relationships; as you know I have no beef against poly as a choice between consenting adults. Unfortunately laws aimed at the former tend to hurt the latter as well.

From:

> Historically and anthropologically, he's got a point: polygamy is very
> strongly correlated with great harm to the status of women and children.

Should that maybe be polygyny specifically? I realize polyandry might also have some bad effect (fraternal polyandry comes to mind, although I couldn't point to a study to say that's fair), but I'm pretty sure that there've been studies showing that children of a poly marriage in a culture that operates with the concept of partible paternity actually tend to do better.

(I may be bogging down in specifics here.)

From:

tisiphone.livejournal.com

lol @me commenting a month late, but actual examples of culturally practiced fraternal polyandry (such as in Tibetan mountain peoples) aren't all that kind to women and children. For one thing, it reverses the gender-balance dynamic of polygyny, leaving many women without husbands. For another, women aren't actually granted more rights; it's a patriarchal property rights relationship, not a matriarchal relationship. The net effect of fraternal polyandry is that women are stuck caring for the domestic and sexual needs of a large number of men, only some of whom (if any) they may actually have an emotional relationship with, and some of whom will be highly inappropriate in terms of domestic partnership due to being far too young or too old. In return, women aren't granted any additional rights and don't gain status in society. In one article I've read on the subject, women that don't marry actually consider themselves superior to their married sisters because they have significantly more freedom. Basically, it's not really much better for the position of women or children than polygyny is, it's just (slightly) differently sucky.

From:

I did say that yes, I suspected fraternal polyandry might have a bad effect. :) But that's one example of polyandry, and specifically the effects of it on women; children aren't mentioned. I'd want to see more examples and more studies before I was comfortable saying that polyandry was close to as strongly correlated with harm to the status of women and children as polygyny; and to say it's close to as bad for both groups strikes me as a prerequisite for being comfortable with the statement that polygamy (as a whole) is very strongly correlated with etc.

From:

tisiphone.livejournal.com

The number of studies related to polyandry generally is limited because it's exceptionally rare.

From:

Regardless of whether some, most, or all polygynous Mormons are abusive, though, it remains the abuse that's the harmful behavior, not the polygyny. They were claiming a right to plural marriage, not a right to abuse wives and children.

This ruling is roughly the equivalent of a judge noting that lesbian relationships have a greater than average correlation with partner abuse*, and upholding a ban on lesbianism on the grounds that the specific lesbian challenging the ban has in fact abused a partner. The character of the claimant, and whether the claimant is guilty of another crime, wasn't the question before the Court.

By the judge's logic, would it also be appropriate to uphold a total ban on all religious practice, so long as the person in front of the bench was a fundamentalist Mormon? After all, his specific religious beliefs are arguably a more central part of his abusive behavior than his polygyny. It's easy to have a plural marriage without abusing anybody; it's much harder to unabusively follow a fundamentalist religion that teaches all women should be submissive to their husbands.

I'm not familiar enough with Canadian law to know whether secular polyamorists will have standing to file a similar suit, but I hope they do. I'd be very interested to see if the results are different.

[* - This is probably not true. It's a for-the-sake-of-argument.]

From:

Let me see if I can put this another way:

Some members of a Louisiana branch of the Ku Klux Klan, which has been putting on increasingly ridiculous public rallies for decades, decides to revive the good ol' days and add occasional lynchings to their repertoire. Some are caught and prosecuted, but actually rooting all of them out proves extremely difficult.

So the state passes a ban on public demonstrations.

When a Klan representative sues to have the law overturned, the LSC judge says "yes, you have a Constitutional right to demonstrate, but I think your demonstrations are harmful, so the ban stands."

From:

I'm not saying the judge is *right*, I'm saying I understand his logic.

Imagine a ban on, say, dogs. On the original grounds that everyone breeding dogs is breeding bad dogs who get lose and cause damage and are a general nuisance.

Owners of an abusive puppy mill that produces inbred, deformed, and poorly behaved dogs, who release feral packs of dogs into their neighbour's yards, sue on the grounds that they have a Charter right to breed and own dogs.

The judge looks at the law, and confirms that yes, there IS a Charter right to own and breed dogs, and that yes, this law DOES violate it.... but then looks at the section that defines when such violations are permitted, and declares that this law's violation of *those particular breeders'* rights is justified.

The court does not address the rights of people other than the plaintiffs, because that's not the job of the court. That question is not something that the court *can* rule on, legally.

(And before you get on about having a section that says when your rights are allowed to be abrogated: You've got that, too, you just phrase it differently. You've got a right to be free, and then they can put you in jail for murder. You've got a right to be proof against unreasonable search and seizure, and then a legal definition of "unreasonable". You've got a right to practice religion without interference, and yet illegal acts as part of a religious practice are not protected. You've got the same thing we do, just not as clearly delineated.)

From:

Like I said over at my place, I think what's happened here is that I'm inappropriately applying my instincts based on American review of laws burdening enumerated rights to a Canadian court, which is obviously illegitimate. Since I'm almost completely ignorant of Canadian standards for review, I won't presume to know better than a Canadian high judge whether he's applied them correctly.

And before you get on about having a section that says when your rights are allowed to be abrogated...

Dude, I'm not going to tell you how to run your country. :) Even if I was that arrogant, my country has far too many windows for me to go throwing stones.

But do take a look at my reply to you over there. Browsing the actual decision, it looks like the judge meant to slap down consensual polyamorists right along with fundamentalist Mormons. His language is... pretty damning.

From:

I think he very well might have, but that doesn't change that:

1) Laws against polygamy have been declared a violation of charter rights
2) This violation has been declared a justifiable violation because of the negative effects of how Mormons do it. Not violating their rights would be worse.

Which leaves the obvious argument open: A group says "all those reasons you said it was definitely a societal ill? Those don't apply to how we do it, and we can prove it. Therefore, the second part can't apply to us."

That argument, if successful, would necessitate the law being modified to exclude them, since they've demonstrated that the infringing law does NOT justify violating their rights, since *not* violating their rights would not create a greater wrong.

Now, the end result really might be the eventual addition of a
3) And we have to violate the rights of non-Mormons, too, because we can't apply the law only to some people and the way Mormons do it is really way too damaging.

Which would be bad - but it might also be
3) The law must be rewritten to prevent only how the Mormons do it, since their way is damaging, while allowing how *you* do it since your way is demonstrably harmless.

From:

jsburbidge.livejournal.com

The normal response is "it's up to the legislature". Judges will "read down" a law to preserve it by restricting its application to what is justifiable, but they won't import detailed conditions to do so.

Drafting a version of the law which excludes the problematic Mormon version isn't all that hard (e.g. requiring a minimum age of, oh, say, 30 before someone can enter into a poly marriage would probably do it, but that wouldn't be very popular with the poly community), but doing it well would be a bit of a challenge. You also have to thread the needle of immigrants with pre-existing polygamous marriages, many of which are de facto as strongly characterised by suppression of the women as Mormon ones (e.g. the family involved in the Kingston killings which is now on trial), and which other non-Mormon religious polygamous traditions you want to exclude and which ones you want to support.

IANAL, but I am an LL.B. I do wholeheartedly agree that judgements are treated as narrowly as possible as deciding the issue between the parties in front of the judge (I will ignore judgements in rem and Declaratory judgements) and that it would have been pretty well impossible to have a judgement explicitly upholding the law for this set of facts while also explicitly striking it down on another set of facts which were before the court.

From:

It's not specifically Mormon poly setups you want to prevent, it's societal one-directional *required* poly setups - where everyone is expected to be in a poly marriage and all poly marriages are one-man-many-women.

The Mormons just happen to be the ones in court, here.

From:

jsburbidge.livejournal.com

That's why it's difficult -- a section specifically forbidding Mormon setups would be easy to write (although you'd probably need the notwithstanding clause to make it stick). Distinguishing between marriages which follow polygynous-only guidelines along with associated problematic patterns from polyamorous ones which are based on a relation between equals and only happen to be polygynous is more difficult. You could make a general provision and leave it for the courts, but that would make for a ton of uncertainty until a large body of case law built up.

From:

I have to run now to family Thanksgiving, but very briefly:

My concern is with the judge's explicit acceptance of the Amicus brief holding that

the harms associated with the practice are endemic; they are inherent. This conclusion is critical because it supports the view that the harms found in polygynous societies are not simply the product of individual misconduct; they arise inevitably out of the practice. And many of these harms could arise in polyandrous or same sex polygamous relationships, rare as those appear to be. Here I mention, without limitation, harm to children (for example, from divided parental investment or as a result of less genetic-relatedness of family members), to the psychological health of the spouses, and to the institution of monogamous marriage.
...
When one accepts that there is a reasoned apprehension that polygamy is inevitably associated with sundry harms, and that these harms are not simply isolated to criminal adherents like Warren Jeffs but inhere in the institution itself, the Amicus’ complaint that there are less sweeping means of achieving the government’s objective falls away. And it most certainly does when one considers the positive objective of the measure, the protection and preservation of monogamous marriage. For that, there can be no alternative to the outright prohibition of that which is fundamentally anathema to the institution. In the context of this objective, there is no such thing as so-called “good polygamy”.

Not to say another court won't ignore his ruling or interpret it out of existence, but this judge seems pretty clearly to have accepted the premise--not that specific cultures with plural marriage are bad and must be suppressed--but that plural marriage itself causes the ills of those cultures.

I have a feeling Canada will eventually recognize plural marriage (and almost certainly before the US does), but this ruling? I have a hard time believing it's a good sign for the short term.

I hope you're right, and look forward to being proven wrong.

From:

PS: I'm not a lawyer. Not *at all*. So I could be completely full of shit about what this means, in practice - but I think I've got a pretty good handle on it.

From:

Not a strong parallel. DVDs might be a target of thieves, but AFAIK, they generally don't cause theft. If somebody burgles your house and they don't find DVDs, they'll take something else. Even with something shiny enough that it does encourage crime - let's say you buy a million-dollar diamond and people are tempted - the person who experiences the risk is the person who chose to buy the diamond in the first place, so we might as well let them decide for themselves whether that's an acceptable risk.

Polygamy - of the type that these Mormon groups practice - is a whole different thing, because there's a causal link to child abuse. When you have a social/religious pressure for each man to have 2+ wives (while not permitting women to have multiple husbands) you inevitably run short of marriageable women. There are several ways to deal with that problem:

- Selective abortion of males (not likely to be a popular option)
- Large-scale recruitment of girls/women from outside (generally unlikely)
- Kill off large numbers of males (has its own drawbacks)
- Large-scale expulsion of boys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_boys_%28Mormon_fundamentalism%29)
- Gradually redefining 'marriageable' to younger and younger women/older and older men

If you have equal numbers of men and women, and life expectancy is around 80 years, then you end up with 50-year-old men marrying 20-year-old women as the norm. Or 48-year-old men marrying 16-year-old girls. Or 47-year-old men marrying 14-year-old girls. Or...

It's not just a coincidence that there's so much child abuse in FLDS-type communities; it's an inevitable result of the demographic pressures that come from mandatory polygyny without polyandry. Even when it doesn't get into what might legally be considered child abuse, having large age-gaps as the norm tends to do unpleasant things to the status of women.

So short of educating people out of these religions altogether (hard), legal sanctions seem to be the only way to deal with a toxic social structure. As a poly person myself, I don't like that at all, but it seems like the lesser of evils.

From:

sucrelefey.livejournal.com

I'm poly and I'm good with this.
The state is still treating everyone the same; every adult gets one legal marriage. There is no discrimination in that.
The atheist in me is all for rulings that sum up as "No, you can not use god as an excuse to be a selfish dick. No, you can not claim a special privilege in the name of god."

From:

"The state is still treating everyone the same: every adult gets one legal marriage to a member of the opposite sex. There is no discrimination in that"

Which is another way of saying: there's actually ONE very good reason to prevent plural or serial marriages. That one single good reason is "What a fucking pain in the ass it is to change all the paperwork everywhere in all the laws that implicitly assumes a two-person partnership".

Apart from that, there's no good reason to prevent three people from filing taxes together and getting hospital visitation rights on each other if you're allowing two people to do it. And that reason is mostly an acknowledgement that the work should be done, not an excuse to not do it.

The fact that these guys were douchebags and this violation of their rights is a good thing for society as a whole does not change that there are other people negatively impacted by the same law, where the violation of *their* rights protects nobody and produces nothing.

I'm not poly, but I think the argument is stupid. Plural marriage, unlike gay marriage, *does* have a real hangup in the implementation step, but that does't make it not doable.

From:

sucrelefey.livejournal.com

Is it some kind Freudian/Pavlovian slip to insert "to a member of the opposite sex" into the quote that wasn't there?

So long as marriage carries some kind of predefined legal/economic benefits from the state that non marriage doesn't it can be rationed by the sate. The solution there is to get rid of marriage as a default legal/economic status all together. Let adults go to lawyers and negotiate domestic contracts custom to their needs.

From:

Is it some kind Freudian/Pavlovian slip to insert "to a member of the opposite sex" into the quote that wasn't there?

No, it was making a point. Specifically, that your argument was identical (and identically asinine) to the one about gay marriage.

Let adults go to lawyers and negotiate domestic contracts custom to their needs.

And carry said lawyer around in their pocket with them to explain the details to everyone else's pocket lawyers every time a question come up about what may or may not be included in any given couple-contract?

There's a useful benefit to being able to say "we have a standard spousal contract!" And, pointedly, there are a great many people who are legally obliged to treat you differently if you're married - so it's of a very great benefit to be able to tell THEM "I have a standard spousal contract with him"

From:

maelorin

as charles dickens once wrote: "the law is an ass!" ;)

(deleted comment)

From:

kierthos.livejournal.com

What? Give lawyers more work? STUFF AND NONSENSE!

From:

ronebofh.livejournal.com

It's "Hear, hear!"

From:

Oh, thank you. I was trying to figure out a way to ask if they were advertising their services as a lawyer, and could not for the life of me come up with something that didn't sound snarkier than I wanted to be.

From:

*raises hand* My needs involve being recognized as a legal spouse/chosen family member/adult-in-partnership of my spouse. Because if I end up in a car accident and am not in a state to authorize medical treatment, finding a parent of mine who's on the other side of the continent and who anyway isn't at their usual place of residence is an unnecessarily lengthy process which is stupidly cruel to the individual I have chosen to spend my life with.

It's not the domestic aspect of the contract that needs negotiating. It is the recognition of that contract by third parties.

From:

snakey.livejournal.com

See also: immigration and child custody rights. (My ex cannot emigrate to be with her boyfriend and girlfriend because said boyfriend and girlfriend are married to each other, and in her situation marriage is the only way she would realistically get residence.)

Edited Date: 2011-11-24 03:55 am (UTC)

From:

maelorin

consider a (medical) power of attorney?

[the great thing about law is that there is always a way. unfortunately, that works both ways.

which is why some of us get reputations for being creative. or sneaky. or ornery. depending upon your point of view :D]

From:

It's a start. Now, on to the matter of said spouse being recognized as family by my insurance carrier...?

(I honestly think I'm just going to go with the marriage license.)

From:

maelorin

"marriage" in the legal sense is a property relationship, not a relationship relationship.

marriage involves two people for several reasons:

1 marriage is an assertion of paternity
2 marriage is an assumption of interests over property as between the couple
3 marriage affects the distribution of property as a consequence of 2

poly-party marriage would not be impossible, but it would require a significant restructure of a great many common law and statutory interests.

common law *assumes* marriage is between two natural persons.

it is entirely possible to make legal arrangements between more than two people: contract law and equity provide some starting materials.

but the *social* implications of the institution of marriage are deeply embedded in common law cultures, and *those* are probably the harder matters to change when all is said and done. [certainly, it's hard enough to get some folks to contemplate de jure marriage between non-boy-girl couples: adding extras into the mix breaks even more brains.]

[nb. i am not amerkin, i iz aussie. but i iz law-talking guy. and happy to be (a) wrong, (b) right, (c) learning more about amerkin lawings. aus has a single national marriage law, and sate-by-state de facto laws. some places also recognise 'civil unions'.]

From:

jerril

Fortunately we're Canadian, not American, so our setup is a little more like yours than theirs. Our laws are more centralized on these issues than yours AFAIK.

From: