We live in a world of labels; conservative, liberal, gay, straight, nature, nurture… It makes us feel more secure, leads us to believe that a person or perspective can be summed up so simply. The reality is that, upon the most basic examination, most people and their perspectives are a combination of multiple factors and life is too complex to boil down to a solitary verb. How many of us have had any success describing ourselves in one word?


I am a conservative often and a feminist always and examining the issue of the polygamy trial of the Mormon leaders in Bountiful through those paradigms brings up an interesting conundrum; what matters more, the protection of women or freedom from unnecessary laws? I think it is something most of us face more frequently than we care to acknowledge; the need to reconcile seemingly competing priorities. The figuring out of what’s more important, more worthy of activism, is the price and the prize of democracy.

Quite frankly, as distasteful as it may be for some, there is nothing antisocial about a person having multiple spouses assuming that they are all consenting adults. Trudeau had it right when he argued we should stay out of people’s bedrooms. We wouldn’t think of getting the courts involved in a situation where a woman has multiple lovers or children with different fathers. Philosophically all those situations are the same. The gray comes in when evaluating the idea of consent – are the women, in what many consider a religious cult, consenting in the strictest sense of the word?

Since we can only presume, a more important question has to be ‘is that concern worthy of legal action’? This is a little akin to arresting Al Capone on tax evasion. It’s a back door approach to prosecuting what we’re really concerned about; the possibility of child abuse, of degradation of women. We rightly object to what may be going on on these compounds. We assume, possibly correctly, that these women are isolated, perhaps do not realize that there is an outside world where they would have more choice. These are surely justified concerns, however, it is a patronizing attitude that could be the thin edge of the wedge. Haven’t we spent enough time telling women what’s good for them?

We have laws in place that protect people from predators; we need to figure out how to make sure these laws have enough teeth. The desire to shield women and children is perhaps virtuous, but legislating morality for the sake of their protection may not be in our long term best interest. Our society supports freedom of speech, choice, and religion. Noble motivation notwithstanding, we need to think long and hard before curtailing freedom.

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Tags: democracy, polygamy, trudeau

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 4:53 am and is filed under Activism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.