Against polygamy

Against polygamy
COMMENTARY BY DAVID WARREN
January 10, 2007

My two standard themes -- the advance of Islamist fanaticism in the world, and the West’s decline into decadence -- start coming together in the subject of “polygamy”.

We will have legalized polygamy in Canada very soon. This is thanks to a decision of the Ontario Appeals Court last week -- that so far no one has had the stomach to take higher -- creating, in law, three parents for one child.

The people of Canada are entirely excluded from this power loop, by judges who, as our Supreme Court chief justice, Beverley McLachlin, is happy to explain, must never be tainted by electoral politics, even to the degree of being approved by Parliament. Nor, as she has also patiently explained, must they be restricted to interpreting the law as they receive it. Nor, I would think, would she make them accountable to God (though she has yet to rule expressly on that issue). No: they are a law unto themselves.

The word for this is “oligarchy” -- where a faction, in this case of judges, rules a country, and writes the laws at its own pleasure. Canada previously aspired to “democracy”, in which the people wrote their own laws, through a Parliament they elected, and a government they could replace. Since no one has yet proposed that Chief Justice McLachlin be impeached, I must assume there is no controversy over this, and that only I, and a few of my rightwing friends, regret the passing of democracy in Canada.

Polygamy follows “multiple parentage” as night follows day. It likewise followed from “same-sex marriage” -- for if the institution cannot be restricted to one man, and one woman, how otherwise can it be restricted? At the time Paul Martin’s Liberal government was rubber-stamping the decision of the same Ontario Appeals Court, to create same-sex marriage in Canada, we received blustering assurances that marriage would always be restricted to “two persons” -- even as the bureaucrats in Mr Martin’s own justice department were telling him that legal recognition for polygamous marriage was being made inevitable. Last week’s “three parent” court decision simply hurries that process along.

The names of the plaintiffs in that case were suppressed by the court. I would be very curious to know who they were. Media reports have implied it was a perfectly normal new post-modern “loving” family unit, in which the child would benefit from the attention of two lesbian moms and one “natural” (i.e. sperm-donating) dad. But I will bet my pension they were in fact activists, recruited or volunteering for the cause. We’ll see: for despite the incuriosity of our liberal media, the truth will out eventually. And it will be important that future generations, who inherit the social catastrophe that must follow from the destruction of the nuclear family, will be able to learn not just what was done through the courts while our generation slept, but how it was done to avoid waking us.

A civilized mind, heir to the deep “Judaeo-Christian” tradition, is filled with horror at the thought of polygamy, which we associate with primitive tribes, and by extension with many other barbarous practices suppressed in Christendom centuries ago. Yet the intelligent student of social history will realize that nothing human is finally suppressed, and that the most primitive behaviour may suddenly revive, usually under some new guise of sophistry. It is why the civilized must be always vigilant -- not only against barbarians on their frontiers, but against barbarous desires arising within their own breasts.

Long ago, we realized the marriage formula “one man, one woman” must secure the hearth of our settled culture -- that no other arrangement could possibly end well. The centuries pass, and we manage to forget why we came to that conclusion, and start tinkering with it again. Civilized men and women have their own taboos -- founded in reason and historical experience -- and the one against polygamy is (or was) among the most powerful. Cross the essential taboo lines, dare others to cross, and the superstructure of any society comes down, whether that society be civilized or primitive.

The irony here is that a decadent lesbo-feminist ideology is being used to force “reforms” that create the conditions for the societal arrangements in the remoter parts of Somalia and Afghanistan. That will, given the rest of human nature, soon reduce women to chattels, while obviating the power in women to restrain the excesses of men.

Wake up, gentle reader. If you don’t want polygamy in Canada, you had better start making a loud noise. For the internal enemies of our civilization have laid all the groundwork for this coup de grace.