Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Supreme Court of British Columbia: Polygamy still illegal

theweaselking points to the British Columbia Supreme Court's ruling on its polygamy case.

-B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman rules that the ban against polygamy is constitutional
-The Judge says the law violates the religious freedom of fundamentalist Mormons, but the harm against women and children outweighs that concern.


Read it as you will:

- Expressing disapproval for the out-group was more important than respecting enumerated civil rights.

- Mormons are so evil that it's necessary to suppress unrelated minorities just to punish them.

- The Court decided that civil rights have to be ignored when a minority of people expressing them behave badly. For the children.

In any case, it's hard to think of a right as a right when your courts have a policy of ignoring it when they don't like its policy implications. C'est la vie. Maybe next time.

[For the record, I don't say this with any hint of superiority. In our recent Heller decision here in the US, all nine SCOTUS justices agreed that the Second Amendment protects a fundamental right to keep and bear arms, but four liberal justices still dissented from the final decision, claiming that something as trivial as a Constitutional right couldn't restrain D.C. from completely banning the possession of functional arms, even in the home. And that's just one example I happen to be particularly familiar with. I'm not about to go throwing any stones over the northern border.]

6 comments:

  1. Well, shit. Sorry man.

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  2. Ah, it only ever affected me symbolically, anyway. Still, it would have been nice to take a step over the border for an FU wedding.

    I think we're way too early to push plural marriage just now. I can't very well chide gay marriage activists for pushing too hard too fast, then demand plural marriage reel sune.

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  3. After two seasons; sister wives, helping or hurting? (I think helping, particularly with their outreach, but I say that as someone who happens to watch it from time to time if my wife has it playing from the DVR and listening to her commentary). At any rate, the kids seem pretty normal for growing up with cameramen all around them

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  4. Who the hell knows? It's good to see mainstream media defanging the Mormon Oppressors from the Patriarchy meme a bit, but the shows also strengthen the assumption most people have that polygamy is synonymous with the FLDS. I suspect it's a wash, if anything leaning into "helping".

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  5. If anyone is oppressed on that show, it's Cody...

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  6. Heh. I don't watch the show, but Wikipedia came to the rescue. :)

    But seriously, man, four wives? I could see that running smoothly enough in an egalitarian poly household where everybody's with everybody, but in a traditionalist heterosexual polygynous household where it means the lone dude is the hinge for four distinct binary relationships?

    That has to be, ah... challenging.

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