Camouflaging polygamy as religious tenet is ridiculous

Re: Canadian polygamy law on trial for first time in 127 years, April 17.

The idea that something that is otherwise immoral or even illegal in Canada becomes acceptable if someone claims it as a religious tenet is ridiculous. Something is immoral if it violates human rights. This includes forcing or coercing children into life-altering situations, such as early marriage; even worse, into polygamy. Whether polygamy among consenting adults is immoral is perhaps a grey area, but it’s significant that most countries that permit it do so with restrictions and it’s rarely practised.

In Anne Innis Dagg’s and my book, Human Evolution and Male Aggression (Cambria Press, 2012), we argue that social monogamy is the natural human mating system and has been since before we were fully human. Scholarly research shows that polygamy arose as an exception to this generality, in agricultural and pastoral subsistence cultures where it became an economic advantage due to necessary division of labour. This hardly applies to Canada.

Wearing the veil or turban, attending religious festivals, praying toward Mecca, eating halal foods: these are religious tenets that do nobody harm. They aren’t immoral and they don’t violate Canadian values, which are generally welcoming to ethnic and cultural diversity.

Various forms of child abuse, discrimination against women and other human-rights violations are offensive to Canadians, would be damaging to the individuals involved if allowed and are illegal for these reasons. This includes polygamy. There is nothing in Canadian law or custom that suggests that polygamy, as practised at Bountiful, should somehow be allowed as a tenet of religious freedom. Lee Harding, Coquitlam