The Case Against Polygamy

• Author: Craig Jones
• Pages: 253-317

253

PART 6

The Case Against Polygamy

The Convergence

Sometime at the end of the evidentiary phase of the hearing, the amicus’s

co-counsel Dickson and I were discussing the schedule of the exchange

or our written submissions. It had occurred to me that, given all that we

knew about the positions being advanced by the other, it didn’t make

much sense to have too much back-and-forth, with the amicus putting in

his argument on breach, the Attorneys General responding to that and

adding our argument on section 1 justication, and the amicus then re-

sponding to that (and heavens knew where all the intervenors would t

in). Dickson was reluctant to proceed that way. “We need something to

shoot at,” he was saying with respect to our section 1 arg ument, “we need

to know what your argument’s going to be.”

I had to laugh — Dickson was giving me too much credit for clever-

ness. I responded that our argument was going to be very simple: “It’s

harmful.”

Now, Dickson had a point about the sequence, and before long we

agreed with the amicus’s proposed schedule for exchange of arguments,

even though it put us up against a tight timeframe. But I wasn’t exag-

gerating much when I summarized our expected submissions. Once you

were past the amicus’s “silver bullet” argument (that is, his assertion that

the very purpose of the law was discriminatory), every aspect of the case

would come down to what the Court found with respect to the harms of

polygamy.

e main theme of our closing submissions was the “convergence” in

the evidence of harm. It was a term I had borrowed from Henrich, who

had used it to describe how the results of the various studies he reviewed

“converged” to support the theories of polygamy’s harms. In our case as a

whole, the convergence was in how, with respect to each of the negative

A Cruel Arit hmetic: Inside the Case Against Polygamy

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correlates of polygamy, the stories of individuals and the anecdotal obser-

vations of academics also t in with the expectations of the experts.

is convergence was nowhere more striking than in the evidence of

the sexual targeting of girls.

e impact of polygamy on girls had been the centrepiece of our evi-

dentiary eorts. It was a harm that was, along with the lost boys phenom-

enon, most directly tied with the cruel arithmetic, and the victims were

so clearly innocent that no one could argue for the idea that their rights

should be sacriced on the altar of their elders’ religious freedom or per-

sonal liberty. So our closing submissions, which began with the phrase “a

polygamous society consumes its young,” focused heavily on the evidence

of the early sexualization of girls.

We began our submissions on this most obvious point by observing

that Mormon polygamy has, from the beginnin g, been noted for the youth

of its brides. Joseph Smith was said to have married severa l teenagers. e

historian Van Wagoner had written of nineteenth-century Mormon po-

lygamists:

Although defenders of Mormon polygamy stress that the principle was

intended for religious rather than sexual purposes, plural wives tended

to be much younger than their husbands. A 1987 study completed by

the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young Uni-

versity found that 60 percent of the 224 plural wives in their sample

were under the age of twent y. e man was usua lly in his early twenties

when he married his  rst wife, who was in her late teens. When he took

a second wife he was genera lly in his thirties and hi s new wife bet ween

seventeen and nineteen years of age. Men who married a third wife

were commonly in their late th irties. e average age of third w ives was

nineteen as were fourth wives whose husbands by then were between

thirt y-six and fort y-ve.1

When the FLDS community at Short Creek was raided in 1953, the

action was justied in part on the basis its residents were engaged in a

“conspiracy to commit statutory rape.” e governor of Arizona described

Short Creek as:

dedicated to the wicked theory that every maturing girl child should

be forced into the bondage of a multiple wifehood with men of all ages

for the sole purpose of producing more ch ildren to be reared to become

more chattels of this lawless enterprise.2

Now, of course, a politician saying something doesn’t make it true.

In the reference, though, the evidence of child brides at Bountiful and

throughout the FLDS communities in North America was simply over-

The Case Against Polygamy

255

whelming. Recall how one of Campbell’s interview subjects reported that

at least twenty-three of her twenty-ve sisters were married before reach-

ing the age of eighteen. Anonymous Witness 2 married at sixteen, as

did her sister wife (also her biological sister). Her own daughter married

(monogamously) at fteen. Witness 4, as I discussed at some length ear-

lier, married at seventeen and her sister wife married at fteen. And of

course, there were the girls of February, as I have called them, whose

stories had been revealed by cross-referencing the YFZ raid with birth

records. And by the time of our closing submissions, there had already

been a number of prosecutions in Texas that involved evidence of numer-

ous young brides.3

Beall had estimated that 30 percent of his female patients from po-

lygamous marriages (from inside and outside the FLDS) were married at

sixteen or less.

Greathead and Horsman compiled for the closing submissions a pa-

rade of underage marriages from their video adavits: Ruth Lane, for-

mer wife of Winston Blackmore, reported him as having married two

fteen year olds among his other, slightly older, teen brides over the years:

“ ey can stretch it however they want,” she had said. “ey were fteen.”

Susie Barlow had been assigned into marriage w ith her fty-one-year-old

cousin when she was sixteen; Lorna Black more had a daughter assigned to

bishop Oler when she was sixteen and a daughter assigned to Oler’s half-

brother when she was seventeen. Jessop was married at eighteen to a man

who was thirt y-two years older than she was. Jessop a lso testied that her

sister wife Tammy was eighteen when she married the eighty-eight-year-

old “Uncle Roy,” who would go on to marry a seventeen year old when he

was “around ninety-six.” Winston Blackmore was said to have required

Teressa Wall to marry at seventeen. Teressa described her thirteen-year-

old sister being forced to marry their cousin, and another sister at eighteen

marrying Rulon Jes when he was well into his eighties. Rena Mackert

was married at seventeen. Mary Mackert spoke of the former prophet

Leroy Johnson taking a twelve-year-old wife. Truman Oler described the

typical age of marriage for girls in Bountiful as sixteen. Again and again,

the testimony was the same.4

Some empirical corroboration of this overwhelming anecdotal evi-

dence was also found in the birth registration records from Bountiful,

which indicate that about a third of mothers identied by the BC Vital

Statistics Agency ocial K lette as coming from Bountiful rst gave birt h

as teens, a rate that is some seven times the provincial average.

Teen pregnancy, of course, is only one indicator of the real problem:

the sexual targeting of girls by much older men in a polygynous society.

e usefulness of teen birth statistics at Bountiful was that, as even the