COMEBACK OF POLYGAMY?: Uwe Siemon-Netto

Will the postmodern "Me" culture in the West advance the cause of polygamy in the world? Will same-sex unions in such nations as Canada act as a vanguard for marriages of not just two, but several partners?

Signs abound that a curious combination of circumstances will threaten to reverse a development known since biblical days. As cultures advance, or so one thought, they move from families with multiple wives to the one-man-one-woman model. ...

But things have changed -- especially in the West. According to the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, just weeks before introducing its controversial same-sex marriage legislation, the Canadian government has launched an urgent study into the social and legal ramifications of polygamy.

This was due to fears that legalized homosexual "marriages" may lead to constitutional challenges from minority groups who claim polygamy as a religious right, the paper reported.

And indeed, Sayd Mumtaz Ali, president of the Canadian Society of Muslims, told the Citizen that if same-sex marriages are legalized "polygamists would also be within their rights to challenge for their choice of family life to be legalized." ...

But while the return to polygamy may not be imminent in the United States, it is coming back forcefully in the formerly Soviet states of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, according to a recent report by the Geneva-based United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.

More troubling still is that in some Western European countries, such as France and Germany, the growing immigrant populations practice polygamy almost unabashedly, even though this clearly violates these countries' laws. ...

But there is yet another side to this story, which troubles observers of the curious coalition between Islamism and the Western "Me culture": What if at some point polygamy is legalized? Will not feminists demand equal rights for polyandrous unions between one woman and several men? And will insistence on legalized group "marriages" between several men and several women come next?

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posted by Eve at 7:44 PM VOTE

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