Repeat After Me: "Polygamy is Bad, and You Don't Like It"

Can life in a polygamous Mormon community really be that good?

Chroncling the testimony of “plural wives” at the B.C. reference case on polygamy, the Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno seems to have shelved her trademark vitriol. Presumably that’s because the testimony itself needs no embellishment to induce rage among most readers: a woman, now 24, testified that at the age of 17 she was spirited away from her Utah village to become the third wife of a forty-something man she’d met a half hour before they were married. Six months later, a 15-year-old girl showed up on their doorstep to become wife number four, and two years later both girls were pregnant. She says she’s happy, blissfully so.

“Of course this [testimony] is all purest nonsense,” writes Barbara Kay in the National Post, “and no more to be taken seriously than a chimpanzee who has been trained to paint a picture by numbers.” According to Kay, women in the fundamentalist Mormon community have been programmed since birth to obey men and believe that the only way to get into heaven is to enter into a “celestial” polygamous marriage. The woman who testified “has lived a hermetically sealed life in the bosom of a community that has brainwashed her,” Kay writes. “She wouldn’t know what critical thinking is, let alone how to employ it.”

But Kay’s wrong, about one thing at least. As DiManno writes, far from being “hermetically sealed,” the women testifying “are clearly anomalies within their community. All have some level of post-secondary education” obtained in the outside world. “She has knowledge of that world but doesn’t want to live in it, prefers the insularity of her cult town.”

And therein lies the problem of course. We’d like to think that the benefits of our society are so universally appealing that anyone exposed to them, no matter what their upbringing, will immediately convert, but it isn’t so. Just ask the U.S. government, which over the years has tried to spread democracy only to have newly emancipated populations turn around and elect communists and militants.

That said, surely there are women in the polygamous community who are less than happy with the arrangement. Let’s hope they make it to the stand.