Sunday, February 05, 2006

Canada: Welcoming Polygamy, Abolishing Marriage?

Stanley Kurtz's latest in National Review Online, "Dissolving Marriage" (2-3-06) is a must read. He explains the significance of the recent official studies by the Canadian government on polygamy and polyamory. Who can seriously argue against the "slippery slope" theory, after reading this?

And don't miss the link to Mark Steyn, who explains that multiculturalist arguments (Muslim husbands with multiple wives) will be the vehicle to get this really rolling in Canada.

[Kurtz:] The way to abolish marriage, without seeming to abolish it, is to redefine the institution out of existence. If everything can be marriage, pretty soon nothing will be marriage. Legalize gay marriage, followed by multi-partner marriage, and pretty soon the whole idea of marriage will be meaningless. At that point, Canada can move to what [the legal "scholars" behind the reports] really want: an infinitely flexible relationship system that validates any conceivable family arrangement, regardless of the number or gender of partners.

The Canadian public cannot bring itself to believe that the abolition of marriage is the real agenda of the country’s liberal legal-political elite. That is why everyone was surprised by [the recent] polygamy report, even though the judicial elite’s intentions had been completely public for five years.

One tidbit in the Kurtz piece: The recent riots in France might very well be linked to all those young men being the products of poor, polygamist families, where there's no strong fatherly presence. BBC News reported (11-16-05):

[S]enior officials from President Jacques Chirac's centre-right party have suggested that polygamy is one factor in the riots, arguing children of polygamous families have less of a father figure and are more likely to live in overcrowded conditions.

"Polygamy... prevents people being educated as they should be in an organised society. Tens of people cannot live in a single flat," Bernard Accoyer, leader of the Union for a Popular Majority (UMP) in the National Assembly lower house of parliament, told French radio. Polygamy is illegal in France but until 1993, it was possible for immigrants to bring more than one wife from their home country to join them.

Is this a good model for Canada to follow?