....the laws against gay marriage are not particularly different than the prohibitions against polygamy ... Each one is illegal wholly by legistative act of the government in defining which marital relations are legal and which aren't.
If courts start striking down gay marriage, on the idea that it's a "right," or "privilege," it becomes more and more difficult for courts to uphold the statutes that make ... polygamy illegal.
This is why such things should be left to the legislature and the ballot box, and not by the creation of "rights" that aren't mentioned in the constitution.
In 2005, after Canada legalized same-sex marriage, then-Prime Minister Paul Martin commissioned a $150,000 study by three law professors to debunk any notion that legalizing same-sex marriage would lead to polygamy.
Big mistake. The study recommended that Canada repeal its anti-polygamy law. While they recognized "the strong association between polygamy and gender inequality," the authors determined it wasn't fair to discriminate, for example, against a Kuwaiti second wife who would be barred from immigrating to Canada with their husband and another wife.
It's funny how quickly the switch can flip. Now civil-liberties types are wondering if maybe polygamy should be legal.
On Monday, the British Columbia Supreme Court began a trial to determine if Section 293 of the Criminal Code, which outlaws polygamy, is constitutional. If the court decides it isn't, Canada could become the only Western democracy without an anti-polygamy law.
This trial is not the result of same-sex marriage. In 2008, a British Columbia prosecutor charged two polygamist leaders of fundamentalist Mormon offshoot sects in the community of Bountiful; a court threw out the case on technical grounds, and now the law itself is on trial.
In an affidavit filed with the court, George Washington University law Professor Jonathan Turley argued that polygamy "is a civil rights issue deserving the same protections afforded to homosexuals and other minority groups."
