British Columbia’s Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Canada‘s 121-year-old criminal law banning polygamy is constitutional.
The ruling stemmed from a failed prosecution in 2009 of two leaders of a breakaway Mormon sect in British Columbia and might have implications for followers of other religions that allow polygamy. In a 335-page decision that followed 42 days of hearings, Robert J. Bauman, the court’s chief justice, found that women in polygamous relationships faced higher rates of domestic, physical and sexual abuse, died younger and were more prone to mental illnesses. Children from those marriages, he said, were more likely to be abused and neglected, less likely to perform well at school and often suffered from emotional and behavioral problems.
“The law seeks to advance the institution of monogamous marriage, a fundamental value in Western society from the earliest of times,” Justice Bauman wrote. “It seeks to protect against the many harms which are reasonably apprehended to arise out of the practice of polygamy.” He also made reference to reports of plural marriages among Muslims in Canada before concluding, “There is no evidence that it is a widespread or mainstream phenomenon.”
The province of British Columbia had asked the court to review the law after polygamy charges against two men in the village of Bountiful were dropped in 2009 partly over concerns about the law’s constitutional status. The sect in Bountiful, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has links to the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Tex., where the authorities seized 468 children in a raid during 2008 and brought charges against 12 men.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in February that they were conducting a criminal investigation in Bountiful because evidence presented to the Supreme Court suggested that eight girls from the village, some as young as 12, had been sent to the United States to marry men.
Members of the sect have argued that polygamy should be allowed under Canada’s constitutional guarantees for religious practices.
On Wednesday, Winston Blackmore, one of the sect’s leaders in Bountiful and one of the men charged in the original case, told The Canadian Press that he had always expected that the issue would ultimately make its way to the Supreme Court of Canada. Yet even if Mr. Blackmore, or someone else, asks that court for an appeal there is no assurance that it will hear the case.
Mr. Blackmore was dismissive of the court’s conclusion that polygamy was harmful to women and children and not a protected constitutional right.
“This isn’t just a religious right, it’s our right to freely associate,” added Mr. Blackmore who in the past has admitted that he had at least a dozen wives and about 100 children.
Shirley Bond, British Columbia’s attorney general, praised Justice Bauman’s ruling. “As he clearly found, there is profound harm associated with polygamy, particularly for women and children,” she said.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 27, 2011
An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the court that upheld Canada’s polygamy law as British Columbia’s highest court. It was British Columbia’s Supreme Court that upheld the law, not the province’s highest court, which is the Court of Appeal.