God bless Judge Robert Bauman.
He’s the British Columbia Supreme Court chief justice who ruled this week that polygamy is a legal and societal abomination.
His verdict sets the stage to end the practice at a self-styled Christian sect where elderly community leaders marry multiple females, including young girls.
Leaders claim this is a religious practice, now protected under Canada’s Charter of Rights. They have been practising polygamy there since long before the charter existed.
Bauman concedes that his ruling infringes on the men’s so-called “rights,” but does so in a legally justifiable way to prevent multiple grievous harms.
A polygamous Christian religious sect, operating in the Kootenay district at Bountiful, B.C., since the 1940s, was the focus of this court case.
Bauman’s ruling said multiple marriage practices there lead to abuse of women, threatens children and creates an underclass of disaffected young men who have no prospects for anything resembling a normal life. Those young men must leave the colony — ill educated and poorly equipped to live in a modern society — to seek a normal life.
Girls who grow up there become sexual slaves — willing or otherwise — to their elderly masters.
Bauman’s ruling, which runs to 335 pages, is not restricted to the personalities and practices at Bountiful. Canada has had a law forbidding polygamy on the books for 121 years. This case was brought forward by the British Columbia government to clarify the status of that law, after years of fruitless legal wrangling.
Criminal cases against two leaders of the Bountiful sect were placed in legal limbo (stayed) in 2009.
Bauman ruled this week that the anti-polygamy law does infringe on what leaders at Bountiful see as their religious freedoms under the Canadian Charter of Rights. It does so, he ruled, in a manner that is eminently justified.
“In my view, the salutary effects of the prohibition far outweigh the deleterious,” Bauman wrote.
“The law seeks to advance the institution of monogamous marriage, a fundamental value in western society from the earliest of times. It seeks to protect against the many harms which are reasonably apprehended to arise out of the practice of polygamy.”
Women, he wrote, are invariably harmed physically and mentally in polygamous relationships.
At Bountiful, girls as young as 12 were shipped off to Texas to “marry” middle-aged men. They had no say in this matter, and were too young to give informed consent in any event.
This amounts to sexual trafficking in the name of God.
“A polygamous society consumes its young,” B.C. lawyer Craig Jones argued for the prosecution before the judge. “It arms itself with instruments of abuse and shields itself behind institutions of secrecy, insularity and control.
“It depresses every known indicator of women’s equality. It is anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, anti-liberal and antithetical to the proper functioning of any modern, rights-based society.”
It’s a compelling argument, one that obviously influenced the judge’s ruling.
The Criminal Code section banning polygamy “minimally impairs religious freedom,” he wrote.
His words, however, will not be the final ones on this issue.
The B.C. government said Wednesday that it will not move immediately to charge the men running the Bountiful sect.
That’s regrettable but understandable.
The best thing that can happen now is for Bauman’s decision to be referred immediately to the Supreme Court of Canada for an ultimate, speedy and definitive ruling on polygamy.
Until that happens, women and children in Bountiful will remain under the domineering sway of a handful of ruthless, vile and horny old men.
Twenty-two years ago this week, Canada endorsed the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child. Among other things, that document compels us to forbid polygamy because of its amply demonstrated perils.
The sooner our Supreme Court can pass judgment on the Bountiful case, the quicker longstanding practices of sexual assault can be halted.
We are long overdue in matching our protective instincts with our laws and behaviour.
We must mourn in seething anger, knowing that more children will be abused in the months to come, as the wheels of justice grind slowly forward.
Joe McLaughlin is the retired former managing editor of the Red Deer Advocate.