On polygamy, child brides and why the stakes in B.C. are so high
By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - 20 Comments
Carolyn Jessop in conversation with Luiza Ch. Savage
Carolyn Jessop, 43, was born in the U.S. into a radical polygamist cult, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS). At 18, she became the fourth wife of a 50-year-old man and bore eight children. She recounts the abuses she endured and her harrowing flight in a book, Escape. She recently testified before the Supreme Court of British Columbia, which is considering whether polygamy laws violate religious freedom under the Charter and whether they can be used to prosecute FLDS leaders in Bountiful, B.C.
Q: Critics of anti-polygamy laws say that the state should not interfere with the religious beliefs or lifestyle decisions of consenting adults. Do you agree?
A: This is not about consenting adults. My position is it is sexual slavery. I was never asked. I was told what I was going to do. My husband Merril never asked me to marry him. The purpose of marriage is not to fall in love but to provide righteous children. They say it’s a victimless crime. I have not seen a polygamous situation that is not abusive to someone in the relationship.
Q: Ironically, you describe your husband, who had more than a dozen wives and 54 children, as emotionally monogamous.
A: If a man gets many wives, he’ll find one he has chemistry with. Once they fall in love, things get difficult for the other women. If he’s not having sex with you, your status in the family goes down. When he shuts you out, they know you are just a prime target for whatever abuse they want to throw at you because he won’t protect you or your kids.
Q: Did you witness child abuse?
A: Systematic abuse. There is a lot of violence toward kids. Merril did a lot of water torture on his babies.
Q: What is water torture?
A: The concept is that you have to break a child’s will before the age of 2. If you don’t, you’ll never be able to control them at the level that their salvation depends on. A baby may be crying because it is hungry. They would take the baby and spank it to really get it going. Then they hold the baby face-up under cold running water for 30 seconds, and as soon as it gets its breath and starts crying, they’d spank it again. A session like that could last an hour until the baby quits fighting from fatigue. That can happen frequently until the parent feels the baby is sufficiently broken.
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If the polygamists prevail
By Charlie Gillis - Friday, January 9, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 57 Comments
Will it be the end of marriage as we know it?
When questions of morality arise, “slippery slope” arguments follow close at heel. No surprise, then, that fear ran wild this morning that Canada’s criminal prohibition of polygamy will soon fall to a constitutional challenge—our weakness for religious freedom being what it is.
Then what? A nationwide rash of multi-spouse relationships? Half-siblings for everyone? Chaos in the family courts? Anarchy? Continue…
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Blogging from Bountiful: Winston Blackmore in his own words
By kadyomalley - Thursday, January 8, 2009 at 7:15 PM - 23 Comments
“If you are married and minding your own business, looking after your family and the two of you are virtuous people, should some other virtuous woman(I will add who is old enough to make her own choices in life)want to join your family, and all are agreed, then whose business is that. No one is hurt, no society is hurt,no family is broken, no vows are violated. Celestial implies virtuous.”
-Winston Blackmore, December 10 2008
It hasn’t been updated since his arrest, but even so, Winston Blackmore’s blog makes for fascinating reading, particularly in the context of his comments to the media earlier today. You can also check out back issues of The North Star, his self-published newsletter, on his website.
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From the macleans.ca archives: No Big Love Lost (originally posted 6/25/2007)
By kadyomalley - Thursday, January 8, 2009 at 4:42 PM - 1 Comment
Is British Columbia finally ready to take on the polygamists of Bountiful?
Kady O’Malley
This month marked the second-season debut of Big Love, the surprise HBO hit about a modern-day polygamous family which thrives in secret under an otherwise conventional suburban existence. The series has received rave reviews not only for its smart storyline and sharp acting, but for successfully portraying the complex interrelationships between husband, wife, wife and wife without resorting to easy parody.
But in British Columbia, there is little love lost between the provincial government and the tiny hamlet of Bountiful, better known as the home of the Blackmore clan. The town’s hundred denizens, adherents of a U.S.-based breakaway Mormon sect, comprise Canada’s best known – and most controversial – polygamous community.
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UPDATED: Breaking: Bountiful's Big Love headed for the Big House?
By kadyomalley - Wednesday, January 7, 2009 at 2:19 PM - 42 Comments
Ooh. So BC’s Attorney General Wally Oppal may have finally mustered up the courage to give Canada’s anti-polygamy law a long overdue road test:
Followers say Winston Blackmore, the leader of the controversial polygamous sect in Bountiful, B.C., has been arrested.
Details were not immediately available but B.C. Attorney General Wally Oppal and the RCMP have scheduled a news conference this afternoon in Vancouver.
According to a court document filed in nearby Creston, Blackmore is facing a charge of practicing polygamy. [...]
Last June, Oppal appointed a special prosecutor to look into allegations of criminal abuse at Bountiful, saying that renewed public concerns compelled him to act.
That came despite two earlier legal opinions that said it would be difficult to proceed with charges of polygamy, with one suggesting a court challenge of the laws surrounding polygamy instead.
After the special prosecutor was announced, Blackmore accused Oppal of religious persecution.
“It can’t possibly be about polygamy,” Blackmore wrote in an email to The Canadian Press last June.
“It must be about his own religious bias and now he wants the Liberal government to persecute some of the citizens that they have an obligation to serve and protect.”
Blackmore has said he has tried to meet with Oppal in the past, but that the attorney general has refused.
UPDATE: It’s not just Winston Blackmore, according to the Globe’s Robert Matas: Apparently Jim Oler, who replaced Blackmore as Bountiful’s bishop, has also been charged.
MORE INFO: The Globe and Mail has posted the indictment, which includes the names of the nineteen women with whom he is accused of having practised “a form of polygamy” and just so we’re all clear on how the law currently stands, here’s the relevant section from the Criminal Code:
Polygamy
(a) practises or enters into or in any manner agrees or consents to practise or enter into
(i) any form of polygamy, or
(ii) any kind of conjugal union with more than one person at the same time,
whether or not it is by law recognized as a binding form of marriage, or
(b) celebrates, assists or is a party to a rite, ceremony, contract or consent that purports to sanction a relationship mentioned in subparagraph (a)(i) or (ii),
is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.
Evidence in case of polygamy(2) Where an accused is charged with an offence under this section, no averment or proof of the method by which the alleged relationship was entered into, agreed to or consented to is necessary in the indictment or on the trial of the accused, nor is it necessary on the trial to prove that the persons who are alleged to have entered into the relationship had or intended to have sexual intercourse.
R.S., c. C-34, s. 257.
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Megapundit: Rosie DiManno vs. the U.S. Army
By selley - Monday, June 9, 2008 at 1:58 PM - 0 Comments
WEEKEND ROUNDUP
Must-reads: …Rosie DiManno on female police in Afghanistan, and on American troops’WEEKEND ROUNDUP
Must-reads: Rosie DiManno on female police in Afghanistan, and on American troops’ enemy-making skills; Scott Taylor on Kandahar prison; Daphne Bramham on the children of the FLDS: Lawrence Martin on Liberal incivility; Thomas Walkom on Roy Romanow; Dan Gardner on pesticides and science; Greg Weston on the lost promise of openness and accountability.
Ils accusent
It’s official: the pundits have absolutely nothing good to say about federal politics. And away we go…If anyone’s going to investigate the unlikely prospect that Maxime Bernier’s left-behind documents represented a security breach, Lysiane Gagnon suggests it be the foreign affairs department, and if necessary CSIS and the RCMP. Committee hearings would be “a joke,” she writes in The Globe and Mail—a “partisan circus,” just like they’ve been at the Schreibergelder hearings. If MPs are really this desperate for something to occupy their well-paid time, she suggests they discuss military equipment, Omar Khadr and the private members bills “that many fear might eventually lead to the criminalization of abortion.”
The Toronto Star‘s Chantal Hébert says Stephen Harper’s “crafting [of] a bipartisan consensus on the future of the Canadian mission in Kandahar” was a rare snapshot of successful “Conservative statesmanship”—a triumph of “finesse” over his manifest preference for “brute strength.” This recollection seems a tad airbrushed to us, but she’s quite right that the government’s been pretty much crap since then, if not before. The positive contributions of Jim Prentice and David Emerson in cabinet are routinely undone by Peter Van Loan’s “overly partisan tone,” she argues, and it’s needlessly damaging the government’s reputation.
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Megapundit Extra: Restraint, thy name is Bramham
By selley - Monday, June 2, 2008 at 6:32 PM - 0 Comments
No, British Columbians, you haven’t gone back in time. Your attorney-general, Wally Oppal, is…
No, British Columbians, you haven’t gone back in time. Your attorney-general, Wally Oppal, is indeed appointing a third special prosecutor to examine the Bountiful/polygamy file in hopes he’ll finally get the opinion he wants—which is (a) that Section 293 of the Criminal Code, which prohibits polygamy, would withstand a Charter challenge and (b) that charges should be laid against one, some or all of the polygamists in Bountiful.
Incorrect opinions have so far come from Richard Peck, who agreed with (a) but believed there was “no substantial likelihood of conviction,” and Leonard Doust, who also agreed with (a) but thought it would make more sense for the courts to rule on Section 293 in the abstract before dragging polygamists into court. Now it’s Terrence Robertson‘s turn. What will he decide? We shall see. But it’s a safe bet he won’t decide quickly.
In any event, we are somewhat amused to see the Vancouver Sun‘s Daphne Bramham—scourge of polygamists and British Columbian attorneys-general alike—file a totally straight-up news story about this tragicomic turn of events. That’s hard to do, in our experience, when you’ve got burning-hot steam coming out your ears and nose. We salute her even keel and look forward to what ought to be a hum-dinger of a column denouncing this latest chapter in BC’s epic history of dithering.
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May 9 shall henceforth be known as National Embarrassment Day
By selley - Friday, May 9, 2008 at 1:01 PM - 0 Comments
Must-reads: …Daphne Bramham on polygamy; Jeffrey Simpson on the refugee system; Susan Riley and
Must-reads: Daphne Bramham on polygamy; Jeffrey Simpson on the refugee system; Susan Riley and Chantal Hébert on l’affaire Bernier-Couillard; Rosie DiManno on the Afghan food shortage; Colby Cosh on uniting the Alberta left.
Bad, Canada. Bad!
From the Creston Valley to the Alberta oil sands to Ottawa—especially Ottawa—we should all be thoroughly ashamed of ourselves.“Two generations have grown up during the period the B.C. government has hidden behind undisclosed legal opinions that polygamy is the cost of religious freedom and because someone somewhere says the government might lose in court,” the inimitable Daphne Bramham writes in the Vancouver Sun. Texas prosecutors have “plenty of evidence that abuse is endemic” among the dozens of children seized from their parents, she notes, but the province still hasn’t sent “any lawyers or social workers down to check on [Canadians among the victims], find out whether they went there willingly or even to take a look at what evidence Texas has collected.” It is time, she argues—still, again, and always—to put an end to this national embarrassment. (We particularly like her idea that the children of Bountiful might eventually launch a class action suit against the B.C. government for allowing them to be treated like low-grade veal. It would be the perfect comeuppance, we think.)
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The baby brides of Bountiful aren't just going to free themselves.
By kadyomalley - Friday, April 25, 2008 at 11:11 PM - 0 Comments
Never let it be said that this is not a blog of its word….
Never let it be said that this is not a blog of its word.
By calling on the Conservatives to take their trademark “tough on crime” approach to the streets of Bountiful, the idyllic British Columbia home of Canada’s most notorious clan of breakaway Mormon polygamists, the NDP’s Dawn Black has earned her party a temporary dispensation from caring about the in and out scandal – at least, as far as Inside the Queensway is concerned.
If anyone can embarrass Ottawa into “doing something” about Bountiful, it’s Dawn Black. She was, after all, the first MP to hold the government to account on the treatment of Afghan detainees, and even if her plea falls on selectively deaf ears at Justice, it’s reassuring to know that someone is willing to speak up for the child brides and lost boys.
(The ITQ amnesty does not, however, extend to any action that would block an attempt by the other opposition parties to investigate I/O — like, say, voting with the government in order to prevent angry Conservative ex-candidates from going before the Procedure and House Affairs committee. Just so we’re clear.)
