Bountiful

The British Columbia government will not launch an appeal after criminal charges against two polygamist religious leaders were recently thrown out of court.

Instead, Attorney-General Mike de Jong said yesterday he will ask the B.C. Supreme Court to clarify the controversial polygamy laws, and rule on whether they violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The decision takes the province down a route it has been avoiding since 2007, when special prosecutor Richard Peck recommended it ask a court to determine if laws that prohibit polygamy in Canada are constitutional.

Source/Full Story: nationalpost.com
Technorati Tags: Winston Blackmore, James Oler, FLDS

Prof. Campbell is one of the few outsiders — and a secular, inquisitive, intellectual one at that — to have a well-informed opinion of the place, based on first-hand observation and experience. She has enjoyed direct, almost unfettered access to the women of Bountiful.
…
Preconceptions she had before her trip to Bountiful were shattered.

The results of her work and the opinions she has formed are controversial. Reaction ranges from mild shock to anger. “I’ve received some hateful emails,” says Prof. Campbell, a Harvard law school graduate who is married (to one man) with children.

Bountiful’s critics, feminists especially, have trouble accepting that women there are not brainwashed, subjugated automatons “in need of deliverance,” which is how the media often portray them, Prof. Campbell says.

In fact, the Bountiful women whom she has interviewed are clear thinking, resourceful and in some cases well educated. Not to be underestimated. They “cast Bountiful as a heterogeneous and dynamic social and political space,” Prof. Campbell wrote in, “Bountiful Voices” an academic paper written earlier this year, “where at least some women are able to wield considerable authority in their marriages, families and community. Their stories thus seem inconsistent, at least to some degree, with pre-existing presumptions about polygamy and its harms for women set forth in conventional public discourse.”

Source/Full Story: Bountiful misconceptions
Technorati Tags: polygyny

Is there anything you would like to say about the Court decision yesterday?

Only to say that I am thankful for this win. I thank God, and I thank Joe and Bruce and their team. I thank all the people that have called in their support. I thank Blair, John, Chuck, and the host of others who were with us in the beginning and pulling for us all the way through.

I thank my family for enduring this trying summer. This was our first win and we needed it. Today we are once again proud to be Canadians. Oh yea, thanks to you media guys that actually wrote a fair story. I hope you don’t get fired!

Source/Full Story: Winston Blackmore’s Blog:  Share The Light
Technorati Tags: Winston Blackmore, FLDS

The Globe and Mail

Madam Justice Sunni Stromberg-Stein found that the former attorney-general of B.C. had unfairly gone “special prosecutor shopping” when he ignored the advice of two prosecutors and kept searching until one was found who wanted to press charges.

By doing so, Judge Stromberg-Stein said, the attorney-general “upset the critical balance that … should be kept between political interference and accountability.”

Source: NYTimes.com

A judge dismissed polygamy charges on Wednesday against two leaders of a fundamentalist Mormon sect based in Bountiful, British Columbia. In January, after an extensive police investigation, Winston K. Blackmore, was charged with being married simultaneously to 19 women and James M. Oler was charged with being married to two women. But Justice Sunni S. Stromberg-Stein of the Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled that the province’s attorney general did not have the authority to appoint a third special prosecutor after two other special prosecutors had recommended not charging the men. Mr. Blackmore’s group is associated with the Yearning For Zion ranch in Eldorado, Tex., where the authorities seized 468 children in a raid in 2008.

Technorati Tags: polygamy

Source: The Canadian Press

Lawyers involved in the case of two men accused of practising polygamy in a small B.C. community may be looking for a change of venue if the controversial case goes to trial.

Winston Blackmore and James Oler, religious community leaders in Bountiful, B.C., attended the 10-minute hearing and the case was put off until Feb. 18.

Linda Mueller, a spokeswoman for the B.C. government, says there was a brief discussion about changing the location of a trial, which would currently be heard in the small town of Creston, about 700 kilometres southeast of Vancouver.

Blackmore is accused of having up to 20 wives and Oler two wives.

Bountiful has about 1,000 residents and has been the subject of several investigations involving allegations of polygamy, sexual abuse and trafficking of teenage brides across the Canada-U.S. border to sister communities in the United States.

The 52-year-old Blackmore and Oler, 44, are the leaders of two rival factions of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Bountiful.

Technorati Tags: Winston Blackmore, James Oler, FLDS

An interesting piece.  Read the full story at the Source: TIME

Winston Blackmore and Family

The farming community of Lister is located in a picturesque valley hard on the U.S. border in southeastern British Columbia, Canada, in the shade of the Skimmerhorn Mountains. It lies roughly between Calgary and Spokane (the closest big town is Creston — pop. about 4,800). Founded by World War I veterans, Lister was always conspicuous for the dark secrets of many of its inhabitants. In the beginning of course, these secrets were the simple memories of the horrors of war. But recent generations have struggled with more complex secrets centered on a farming settlement in a corner of Lister known as Bountiful — and paralleling the events that unfolded in Eldorado, Texas in April 2008.

Made up of as many as 1,000 adherents of a fundamentalist Mormon sect, Bountiful has been home to clans of polygamists since the arrival in the late 1940s of the homestead’s founder Harold Blackmore, who — according to one account — was drawn to the valley after envisioning it in a dream. Blackmore was part of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which was expelled from mainstream Mormonism in the 1930s. For generations, local farmers co-existed with the polygamists of Bountiful. But this relationship, based on the country tenet of “live and let live,” grew increasingly uneasy over time as strange stories of life within the settlement leaked out, and found their way into the media with accounts of a power struggle between Winston Blackmore, the sect’s leader in Bountiful, and Warren Jeffs, the leader of the FLDS Church. Jeffs, now incarcerated in the U.S. for being an accomplice to rape, is facing charges in the aftermath of the raid on the polygamist Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado. (See pictures of two polygamist families.

Technorati Tags: FLDS, Harold Blackmore

Source: financialpost.com

Winston Blackmore shot back at the British Columbia government Thursday, defending his polygamist Mormon faith.

“Iam what Iam and we are what we are,” Mr. Blackmore said in a statement to reporters at the Mormon Hills elementary school near Creston, B.C.

Mr. Blackmore and another leader at the Mormon colony, James Oler, were charged Wednesday with polygamy.

“We are descended from a long line of Mormon-believing people. My family did not make up our faith nor did we establish the fundamental teachings of Mormonism,” said Mr. Blackmore.

“Jesus Christ is our Lord and Saviour. He has taught us and Ihave taught my children that they should pray for their enemies as well as their friends. That is what we will continue to do.”

Oler could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Full Story

Technorati Tags: Winston Blackmore, FLDS, James Oler

Source: The Canadian Press

A teenaged relative of Winston Blackmore says RCMP travelled to the United States late last year to interview her about her uncle.

Cindy Blackmore says two Mounties who flew to Las Vegas also asked her what it was like to grow up in the polygamous community of Bountiful, in southeastern B.C.

The seventeen-year-old, who was raised with two mothers in a polygamous family but left home at 14, says she is not a polygamist but is not against it.

She says people should have the choice about whether to live that kind of lifestyle, even though she chooses not to.

Fifty-two-year-old Winston Blackmore and 44-year-old James Oler were arrested Wednesday and charged with one count each of practising polygamy in a case that will test the country’s prohibition of multiple marriage.

Winston Blackmore is expected to make a public statement later today.

Technorati Tags: Winston Blackmore, FLDS

When men deny infallibility to God and Scripture (His Word) the concept in and of itself doesn’t simply disappear, but is transferred to some other entity of our own choosing- and usually one constructed after our own image- , such as church, the state  or the school.   I think the concept of infallibility has, at least in our minds, been transferred to the State, in particular a certain form of State government, ie. Democracy.  This is an obvious error, which the sentence in bold below illustrates rather well.

Yes, the democratic State in fallible, and engages  in religious persecution, and has done so in one form or another since it’s conception.  The rules may change, but the war rages on.

Source: nationalpost.com

Polygamy has been illegal in Canada since 1892, when a law was passed to keep polygamous Mormons out of the country. The modern statute, called section 293, dropped the bias against Mormons but continued to make polygamy illegal. But over all those years the law has rarely been applied even though police on occasion have said charges should be laid.

In 1990, a B. C. police investigation recommended charges be laid in Bountiful but the Crown received legal opinions that the polygamous ban would be struck down as an “unjustifiable infringement of religious freedom.”

In 2006, the RCMP looked at sexual exploitation charges instead, but it was agreed that there would not be enough evidence to get a conviction.

In 2007, Mr. Oppal appointed Vancouver lawyer Richard Peck to make an independent assessment of the law and how it might be used. While Mr. Peck concluded that polygamy was the “underlying phenomenon from which all other alleged harms flow” in Bountiful, he did not think a prosecution would work.

Rather, he advised that section 293 be referred to the courts to test its constitutionality, which experts said would give the law real clout if it were upheld. Mr. Peck wrote that he thought the law would be upheld.

He discouraged individual prosecutions, such as the ones announced yesterday, because they “would likely face a number of obstacles, resulting in a cumbersome and time-consuming process” and that the “constitutional issue might not be heard for some time after the charges are laid.”

Following Mr. Peck’s report, another Vancouver lawyer, Leonard Doust, was also asked to give his recommendation and came to the same conclusion.

Other legal experts have also had strong concerns about the chances of individual prosecutions.

Ms. Baines said yesterday that if the polygamy issue was going to go to court, a reference would have been the way to go.

That way, she said, it would have been a quicker route to a higher court and it would have allowed for various intervenors to make their case. However, even with a reference she was convinced section 293 would have been struck down.

She said complicating the issue is the large number of immigrants who are coming to Canada from countries where polygamy is recognized as legitimate.

But because it is illegal here, there is no way of knowing what impact that is having on the women and children who live in such families.

“The problem is that Canadian culture has changed significantly and there are many people living secretly in polygamous relationships. There is an assumption that polygamy is bad for women and children–but as long as it’s a crime, no one is going to belly up and say they’re living in the relationship. Until they decriminalize it, we can’t know if it’s harmful in Canada.”

Others see the issue of polygamy getting blown out of proportion because of the particular case of Bountiful. Last year, James Gratl, then president of the B. C. Civil Liberties Association, said the problem with anti-polygamy laws is they assume there is one form of marriage that is proper.

Full Story

Technorati Tags: Winston Blackmore, FLDS, Bountiful

Source: nationalpost.com

The charges brought yesterday against two leaders in the polygamous community of Bountiful, B.C., are likely the first steps in a process that could see Canada’s anti-polygamy law struck down as unconstitutional.

Over the past two decades, four attorneys-general in British Columbia have been reluctant to lay a charge because of a fear that their cases would have no chance of surviving a religious freedom defence under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Last April, Wally Oppal, the current Attorney-General of the province, said the criminal justice branch believed any prosecution would fail because of a possible violation of the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom. But he also said the only way to test its constitutionality was to lay a charge and “then let the defence worry about the constitutionality issue.”

But Beverley Baines, a law professor at Queen’s University who produced a report for the federal government in 2006 on the polygamy issue, said yesterday that a constitutionality challenge is one the government is likely to lose.

“It was sufficiently clear [the law] was unconstitutional and we shouldn’t waste taxpayer money on individual court cases,” she said yesterday about the conclusions she reached in her report, which called for polygamy to be decriminalized.

Full Story

Technorati Tags: Winston Blackmore

Source: CTV.ca |

Two leaders of a controversial religious sect in Bountiful, B.C. have been arrested and charged with polygamy.

Winston Blackmore and James Oler that been named the arrested, B.C. Attorney General Wally Oppal confirmed Wednesday.

Oppal said Blackmore is alleged to have committed polygamy with 20 women and Oler, with two women.

“This has been a very complex issue,” he said. “It’s been with us for well over 20 years. The problem has always been the defence of religion has always been raised.”

Two previous legal opinions have said that polygamy charges might be thrown out under a Charter of Rights challenge.

“I’ve always disagreed with that,” Oppal said of using freedom of religion to defend the practice of polygamy.

Oppal said that in 2005, when he was appointed attorney general he was concerned about polygamy in Bountiful “because of the exploitation of women and children.”

In June 2008, Oppal appointed a special prosecutor to investigate allegations of abuse at Bountiful.

About 800 to 1,000 people live in the community, all members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) or an off-shoot sect based on the teachings of Blackmore. Both religions believe in the practice of polygamy.

The FLDS broke off from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the early 1900s when the Mormon church renounced polygamy.

Blackmore is the defacto leader of Bountiful, even though he was excommunicated from the FLDS in 2002 following a power struggle with the sect’s disgraced prophet Warren Jeffs.

Jeffs is now jailed for life on two counts for being an accomplice to rape for arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her 19-year-old cousin.

Blackmore’s first wife has gone on the record to say that he has about 25 wives. Blackmore himself has made public statements admitting to have numerous wives and dozens of children but has said the community does not sexually abuse children.

Oppal was under fire to investigate Bountiful by both politicians and activists and relented after the community entered the national spotlight after authorities in Texas raided a similar polygamous sect, because of suspicions of child abuse.

Blackmore has refused to comment on allegations that teenage girls are pushed into marriages with much-older men or that other girls are sent to other polygamous sects in the United States.

Full Story

Technorati Tags: FLDS, Winston Blackmore, James Oler

From: globeandmail.com

Prominent polygamist Winston Blackmore and his family could receive more than $10,000 this month from the B.C. government in so-called dividend cheques. Others in the polygamist community of Bountiful with fewer wives and smaller families will receive less, but government payments could still be substantial.
…

The B.C. government is sending $100 to every man, woman and child in the province as part of a climate-change program. The list of adults comes from income-tax returns. The names of children come from the federal government’s Canada Child Tax Benefit program; their cheques will be mailed to their parents or primary caregivers. British Columbians who do not pay income tax or receive a child-tax benefit can apply directly to the provincial government for the money.
Print Edition – Section Front

Mr. Blackmore was skeptical about whether the B.C. government would send the cheques to him.

“I am sure that the BC government will do everything possible to see to it that my family does not get the $100 cheque. So it will make no difference to us whether we be few or many,” Mr. Blackmore stated during the e-mail exchange.

Via: globeandmail.com

More police work and research on polygamy in British Columbia are unnecessary delays that threaten to tie up the contentious issue until after next May’s provincial election, Nancy Mereska, co-ordinator of an Alberta-based anti-polygamy group, said yesterday.

“Research could take another year to get through it all. I could send you a list of books as long as my arm,” said Ms. Mereska, of Stop Polygamy in Canada, in an interview from Two Hills, Alta.

“I believe now that this is another delay tactic. We may not see anything happening until after the election. I’m very disappointed.”

Special prosecutor Terry Robertson was appointed this month to decide whether polygamists at a religious community in Bountiful, in the southeast corner of B.C., should face criminal charges. He told The Globe and Mail last week that he intends to ask the RCMP to reopen its investigation into the polygamous community to find out whether men in authority fathered children with underage girls. He also said more research will be done into the effect of polygamy on society. He anticipated he would complete his review in the fall.

Yes indeed folks, now it’s Canada’s turn to trample all over some of it’s citizens. If the USA can do it so can they.

Via: globeandmail.com

The special prosecutor looking into polygamy in British Columbia says he intends to ask the RCMP to reopen their investigation into the polygamous religious community at Bountiful to find out whether men in authority fathered children with underage girls.

“The law says it is an offence for a person in a position of authority over another to sexually touch someone if they are under 18,” Vancouver lawyer Terry Robertson said in his first extensive interview since his appointment this month in the high-profile case.

Some members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who live in Bountiful have spoken openly about their polygamous relationships as part of their religion. Some women who have left the community say girls as young as 14 have been married to men more than 20 years older.

Reinvigorating the police investigation is only part of the work that Mr. Robertson said he plans to undertake before submitting his report this fall. He also indicated he intends to head in a new direction in his analysis of the crime of polygamy, as set out in the Criminal Code.

From: CNN.com

British Columbia’s attorney general has ordered a third investigation into the Canadian branch of a polygamous sect — even though the first two such efforts failed over questions about whether polygamy is illegal in Canada.

Attorney General Wally Opal on Monday called for a special prosecutor to look into allegations of sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of girls in the community in Bountiful, British Columbia.

“We keep hearing about many young girls who have established relationships with much older men,” Opal told reporters, saying the girls are 14 to 16 years old.

He said the issue is whether the criminal code on polygamy is constitutional, which has been a point of contention in British Columbia’s judiciary for 20 years.

At Opal’s request, two lawyers recently issued opinions on the matter, both concluding it would be difficult to pursue criminal charges and one saying it would be unfair to do so, according to Opal’s office.

Opal picked Vancouver lawyer Terrence Robertson to determine whether the sect can be prosecuted successfully.