Polygamy just doesn’t make sense

By Mindelle Jacobs,Edmonton Sun

                            First posted: Sunday, November 06, 2011 01:00 AM MDT | Updated: Friday, November 04, 2011 05:53 PM MDT

There isn’t a shred of evidence that polygamy benefits women. Even the UN, often a laughingstock of blind ideologues, has declared that polygamy violates women’s equality rights.

Still, that hasn’t stopped academics (who should know better) from suggesting that polygamy be decriminalized.

The latest educator to jump on the decriminalization bandwagon is U of A poli-sci professor Lois Harder. In a recent study written for the Vanier Institute of the Family, Harder wonders if women in polygamous families might be better off if polygamy wasn’t a crime.

“Decriminalizing polygamy would not entail expanding the definition of marriage to include polygamous marriages,” she wrote. “Rather, it would provide a firmer foundation from which to protect women and children in polygamous relationships from exploitation.”

Yeah, right. Remove polygamy from the Criminal Code and all those young girls and women who’ve been brainwashed by the men in Bountiful, B.C., and other polygamous communities will shake off the shackles of exploitation and go to university to become doctors, lawyers and, oh, poli-sci profs.

“In contexts in which exploitation is not presumed to be at issue, the question arises as to why polygamy … should not be accorded some legal status,” Harder argues in the paper, After the Nuclear Age, in which she explores recent developments in Canadian family law.

It’s incredibly naive to believe that polygamy can exist without the exploitation of women. The females in these dysfunctional relationships may not think they’re being taken advantage of. They may, in fact, insist they freely chose such a lifestyle.

After all, what woman wouldn’t want to get married in her mid-teens to someone old enough to be her father or grandfather, drop out of school, have a baby every year and share her husband with a bunch of sister-wives?

Isn’t that every woman’s dream?

Proponents of polygamy, or polyamory, describe it as “responsible non-monogamy,” Harder notes. “This phrasing challenges the presumption of promiscuity, immorality and the twinned responses of moral repugnance and titillation that often accompany popular representations of non-monogamous relationships.”

This presumes that women in polygamous relationships, like those in the demented fundamentalist Mormon communes in Canada and the U.S., had any real choice in the matter.

On the contrary, any stirrings of free will are stamped out from the time these females are toddlers.

They are bred solely to satisfy the sexual and narcissistic needs of a bunch of male control-freaks who try to disguise their misogyny as religion.

(The young men in these communes are also victimized, pushed out of the communities so they won’t compete with older men for the brainwashed young women.)

Polygamy is simply incompatible with equality and basic human dignity. It’s soul-destroying and merely feeds the deranged dictates of pathological egotists.

While these fundamentalist Mormon megalomaniacs shun the outside world, they have no problem “bleeding the beast” — or hitting up the government for welfare for all their wives and children.

Harder suggests that recognizing polygamy would help women in these relationships because legal status would confer obligations and entitlements — presumably things like property rights and financial support.

“If Canada was to extend various forms of entitlements and obligations to people as a result of the existence of interdependence, it may well be that people participating in polyamorous relationships would benefit,” she writes.

And pigs will fly.

http://www.edmontonsun.com/2011/11/04/polygamy-just-doesnt-make-sense

Thank you, Mindy Jacobs of the Edmonton Sun for another well-reasoned/researched artle on polygamy.  Readers, if you go to the article, you’ll see further comments by anti-polygamists and pro-polygamists alike.  Feel free to join the conversation.

Nancy Mereska, President
Stop Polygamy in Canada