Religious tyrants twist tolerance for their own ends
 
By Daphne Bramham
Vancouver Sun
 
What in the name of tolerance are we doing in Canada?

Most thinking people can't countenance the notion that old men -- so-called religious leaders -- keep harems of women, including teens, for the purpose of breeding a pure stock.

Yet for 50 years, politicians, bureaucrats and law enforcement officials haven't seen it that way when it comes to the polygamist community of Bountiful in southeastern British Columbia.

For the past two decades, B.C. lawmakers and enforcement agencies have fallen back on the excuse that leaders of Bountiful's Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints can not be prosecuted for the Criminal Code offence of polygamy because the Canadian Charter of Rights guarantees religious freedom.

In doing so, they've ignored evidence provided by former concubines about leaders who have as many as 80 wives, about alleged sexual exploitation of child "brides" by "husbands" two and three times their age.

One of the primary reasons most thinking people supported Canada's intervention in Afghanistan was outrage over the Taliban using Islamic or sharia law to suppress, abuse and subjugate women and girls.

Yet the Ontario government last fall agreed that sharia could be used to settle marriage, family and business disputes within Muslim communities. That's something Malaysian politicians have consistently resisted even though Islam is the state religion there.

In our rush to accept different cultures and religions, we are endangering the very freedoms that our Constitution was designed to protect.

In our anxious quest for tolerance, we have stopped asking and answering a fundamental question: When does culture stop being culture and start being abuse?

One can only imagine what glee it strikes in the hearts of the FLDS and Islamic leaders -- exclusively men -- that they can use the Charter to deny equality to women and girls in the name of freedom. It must be especially satisfying for them if they recall that it was women's groups who were among the strongest and most vocal proponents of the Charter's inclusion in the Constitution in 1982.

Muslim women in Ontario have been quick to note that they didn't come from countries like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia to have those systems foisted upon them here.

They chose Canada so they would not be subject to religious decrees about what they can wear, whom they can befriend, marry or even divorce and where and how they can travel.

They came here because they wanted more possibilities and more choices. They wanted the freedom to choose -- including the freedom to follow Islam or reject it entirely.

Iranian-born Homa Arjomand, who heads the International Campaign to Stop Sharia Courts in Canada, fears that not only will even limited use of sharia endanger the rights of women, approving its use will encourage other illegal activities.

Arjomand, a counsellor for immigrant women in Toronto, told The Toronto Star that even without sharia many Muslim women don't dare report being battered by their husbands.

Bigamous marriages occur. Among her clients are two 14-year-old girls who were married last year to older men, in defiance of Ontario law prohibiting marriage before age 16 and in defiance of the Criminal Code offence of polygamy.

And while immigrant women may come here because Canada guarantees equal rights, it's questionable whether the Canadian-born women and girls of Bountiful even know about their Charter rights.

Religious leaders control both schools at Bountiful -- one of which received $460,826 in government grants last year.

The schools reinforce FLDS teachings. Primary among them is that any boy over the age of 12 belongs to the priesthood and that priests control the most basic decisions about what women and girls can wear, who they marry and what they can do with their lives.

Even though all B.C. students are required to have different job experiences as part of the mandatory career and personal planning program, it doesn't happen at Bountiful Elementary-Secondary School.

In 2002, education ministry inspectors reported that Bountiful's girls were only allowed to do "preparing, catering and cleaning up after a meal" and "sewing and experiencing other types of handiwork or needlework."

Despite that, the ministry continues to fund the school under its Independent Schools Act.

If we needed an outside perspective on Bountiful and what's being allowed to happen there, we got one this week in the prestigious Economist magazine.

"They like to think they do a good job protecting women's rights and fighting pedophilia. Canadians would not be so smug if they knew of the dirty little secret in the Creston Valley, in southeastern British Columbia," it says.

"For half a century, a hotbed of polygamy has quietly flourished there in a commune called Bountiful."

Canada's Charter was never intended to protect the rights of autocratic religious leaders to deny equality and freedom to others. It's time that our political leaders recognized that and acted accordingly.
 
Vancouver Sun
Originally published Saturday, July 17, 2004
 
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