By Pete McMartin, Vancouver SunNovember 23, 2010
Pete McMartin
Pete McMartin
Photograph by: Sun, Sun
I am batting .500 when it comes to marriage. I struck out in my first time at bat, and was lucky enough to knock it out of the park in my second.
There is nothing remarkable about this. I have plenty of company. My present wife was divorced. Many of our friends and colleagues have divorced. So many of my children’s friends come from broken homes that my children, who have known only one set of parents, are oddities among them. Three of my siblings’ marriages ended in divorce — none of them “amicably,” as they say in Hollywood — and my parents, who were miserable together for much of their lives, should have divorced but did not. One did not do that back then. Pity.
One does so now. In its October 2010 study, the Vanier Institute of the Family reported that in Canada, four in 10 first marriages end in divorce. It found also that among married families, about 20 per cent of children live with only one parent, hardly a ringing endorsement of marriage as a safe haven for child-rearing.
Not surprisingly, the Vanier’s findings suggest a growing disaffection for marriage as an institution.
Its traditional raison d’etre — to provide a stable environment in which to raise children — is losing its hold. The study found that while the divorce rate had fallen, so had the marriage rate, and for the first time in Canadian history, there were more unmarried people over the age of 15 than married people. There were, also for the first time in Canadian history, more married couples without children than married couples with children. And the fastest growing type of relationships among Canadian families with children?
Common-law.
These findings do not necessarily mean the institution of marriage has lost its way. It does mean, however, it has lost its old relevance. We don’t look to it to provide financial stability as we once did: Most couples now postpone marriage until they establish their financial stability first. Young couples also no longer see wedlock as a guarantee of familial happiness.
And who could blame them? The landscape of the traditional monogamous marriage is littered with wrecks. We’ve made a mess of it.
No wonder, then, that the idea of marriage would mutate. We are now a country that recognizes and accepts same-sex marriages, and accepts that those marriages are suitable platforms for child-rearing. The same legal rights have been granted to common-law relationships, too, where commitment, and not a certificate issued by the state, is the binding principle.
But then why should the state have any say in the relationships adults wish to form? As one of us famously said: “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation ... and what’s done in private doesn’t concern the Criminal Code.”
Back then, in 1967, it was a young Pierre Trudeau as justice minister proposing to decriminalize, among other things, homosexuality, and lo and behold, the nation survived. The nation, I’d suggest, is better for it.
And yet here we are today, embarking on a trial to determine the legality of polygamy. The critics of polygamy — as that institution is epitomized in B.C. by the Kootenay backwater of Bountiful — have a litany of social harms they say is associated with it, and want the century-old law upheld and applied.
The argument is, essentially, that those alleged social harms are endemic to the institution of polygamy, and that one necessarily flows from the other.
That is for the B.C. Supreme Court to decide, though I expect that whatever its decision, the case will eventually find its way to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Meanwhile, I can’t help but ask:
What use has the government made of all its many other existing laws that are perfectly suited to punish the alleged aforementioned social harms inherent in polygamy — laws relating to confinement, or consent, or underage sex, or forced marriages, or rape, or sexual, physical and mental abuse, or school attendance and school standards? Why prosecute an idea and not an action? After all, we don’t ban driving to save lives. We prosecute those who drink and drive to save lives.
This isn’t an argument for polygamy: It’s not my cup of tea. I have enough trouble pleasing one wife.
But it is an argument for the proper application of the Criminal Code. Punish crimes where you find them, not by sexual or matrimonial preference.
Because if we must, and we believe that by outlawing polygamy we will, at a stroke, do away with abandonment, confinement and physical and sexual abuse in those communities, shouldn’t we, if only to extend that logic, be looking at criminalizing monogamy, in which the vast majority of the above crimes are committed?
pmcmartin@vancouversun.com
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Pete McMartin
Pete McMartin
Photograph by: Sun, Sun
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