polygamy

The British Columbia Supreme Court is expected to consider in 2010 whether laws prohibiting polygamy are in conflict with Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, The Globe and Mail reported Monday. The case will likely affect religious and immigrant groups across Canada that accept polygamy as a way of life, the newspaper said.

Source/Full Story: breitbart.com

Yep, Michigan law calls this polygamy and not bigamy as one might expect.  The sentence is surprisingly lite…I wonder how a male defendant would have fared.  Anyway, here’s another interesting tidbit from the Michigan penal Code for those of you living there:

750.441 Teaching, soliciting and advocating polygamy; felony.
Sec. 441.
Teaching, soliciting and advocating the practice of polygamy—Any person who shall solicit to a polygamous life, or teach polygamy as a correct form of family life, for the purpose of inducing men and women to enter into the practice of polygamy or advocate the doctrine and practice of polygamy, or attempt to persuade any person by private or public discourse to adopt a polygamous life, shall be guilty of a felony.

I moved out of Michigan back in 1991. 

A Bay City woman who pleaded guilty to polygamy will stay in jail for another 16 days.

Macomb County Circuit Judge Peter J. Maceroni on Monday sentenced Martha A. Flemming to 90 days in jail, with credit for 74 days.

Flemming, 43, was still married to Charles Nellett in January when she married Albert Flemming Jr. at a St. Clair Shores church.

Nellett and Flemming wed in 1995.

Martha Flemming returned to Bay County after disappearing in April from the Detroit home she shared with Albert Flemming.

Also missing were Albert Flemming’s car and an $8,000 inheritance check he received from an uncle, St. Clair Shores police have said.

Police arrested Martha Flemming in September in Bay City. She pleaded guilty in October.

Source/Full Story: Bay City News

A law professor nominated by President Obama to become a commissioner for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was a signatory to a radical 2006 manifesto which endorsed polygamous households and argued traditional marriage should not be privileged “above all others.”

Georgetown University Law Center professor Chai R. Feldblum, nominated as a commissioner for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), is listed as a signatory to the July 26, 2006 manifesto “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families & Relationships.”

The manifesto’s signatories said they proposed a “new vision” for governmental and private recognition of “diverse kinds” of partnerships, households and families. They said they hoped to “move beyond the narrow confines of marriage politics” in the U.S.

Source/Full Story: Catholic Online

An new informal survey by a Utah-based polygamy advocacy group estimates 38,000 people believe in or are living the practice – an increase of about 1,000 in about two years.

The survey by Principle Voices includes adults and children in polygamous and monogamous families who consider themselves fundamentalist Mormons. The last survey was conducted in 2007.

Source/Full Story: abc4.com
Technorati Tags: polygamy

Pro-polygamy activists want to see bigamy, at least among consenting adults, decriminalized.

“If adults have chosen this lifestyle for themselves and it’s all about creating families and there’s no underage marriages or abuse, I see no reason why it can’t be decriminalized or legalized,” said Anne Wilde, one of the founders Principle Voices, which sponsored Friday’s conference.

But because prosecutors won’t charge bigamy as a crime itself, polygamists can’t get a court challenge on religious freedom grounds. Past appeals of Utah’s polygamy ban and similar laws prohibiting plural marriage have failed in part, because the alleged victims in the cases were minors.

Torgensen said it is not the attorney general’s role to help push a case of polygamy among consenting adults forward.

“Because of that, we’re stuck,” said Brown.

“So you want to be charged, in a way?” she was asked by Fox 13’s Ben Winslow.

“Bring it on,” Brown replied. “Kind of. We need a test case. We need it decriminalized. People need to see that there are families out there that would be a good representation of the plural communities and we just live our lives like everybody else and that’s the only law we break.”

Source/Full Story:  KSTU
Technorati Tags: polygamy

Nancy Mereska knows me, so it would seem, although I haven’t a clue as to who she is or by what means she came to conclude that all polygamous relationships are abusive.  I’m sure she knows what she is talking about since she obviously knows all polygamists.  I mean, she has to, right?  I suppose she considers all Arabs to be terrorists and all blacks to be criminals as well.

Winston Blackmore, who faces criminal charges for having 19 wives, is offering online advice to women in abusive relationships.

Five months after he advised his blog readers that he would remain silent until his court case is finished, Mr. Blackmore posted answers on his website sharethelight.ca to a series of questions that he says he has been asked.

First, he states the question: What advice would you give a woman that is locked in an abusive relationship?

“This sounds like a question for the Ann Landers column,” he responds.

However, Mr. Blackmore says, he will treat the question as a general inquiry, not a personal problem.

He also says he decided to limit his response to physical abuse, although critics of polygamy say all women in polygamous marriages are in abusive relationships.
…
Nancy Mereska, who for the past six years has headed an e-mail campaign to stop polygamy in Canada, was startled by Mr. Blackmore’s posting.

“I consider all polygamous relationships abusive,” she said Tuesday in an interview from her home in Two Hills, Alta., 100 kilometres northeast of Edmonton.

“I mean, all polygamous relationships. I don’t care how modern they try to appear,” she said. “Every aspect of a polygamous relationship is abusive.”

Source/Full Story @: The Globe and Mail
Technorati Tags: Winston Blackmore

This would be bigamy, which is “the crime of being simultaneously twice married: the crime of marrying somebody while being legally married to somebody else.”

Martha Fleming tied the knot with a Detroit man in January.

Unfortunately, St. Clair Shores police said, her new husband didn’t know that Fleming was already married — for nearly 13 years — and he didn’t expect her to run off with a $9,000 inheritance check from his dead uncle.

"She splits with the money and leaves him high and dry," St. Clair Shores police Detective Margaret Eidt said Friday shortly before Fleming was arraigned on a polygamy charge, a four-year felony.

Fleming, 43, was ordered held in the Macomb County Jail on a $15,000 cash surety bond during arraignment in 40th District Court in St. Clair Shores. She is to wear a tether if she posts bond and is released from jail.

Eidt said Fleming married her second husband Jan. 30 at Christ Gospel Tabernacle Church, 30500 Harper, in St. Clair Shores. But she had been married to a man in Bay City since 1996.

Sometime shortly after her second marriage, she took the inheritance check from her second husband, cashed it in Harper Woods and took off, Eidt said.

The detective said a civil attorney representing the second husband discovered Fleming was already married. Eidt said Harper Woods police are investigating the theft of the inheritance check.

Eidt said she has been looking for Fleming since May, when an arrest warrant was authorized on the polygamy charge.

Fleming, who also goes by the last names of Smith, Nellett and Chatfield, was arrested about 3 a.m. Friday in Bay City, the detective said.

Source/Full Story: Freep.com

Wow, such absolutes.  Is anyone still listening to these windbags?

Flora Jessop and Kathy Nicholson know firsthand what it’s like growing up in a polygamist family. The two women escaped a sect compound in Colorado City, Ariz., as teenagers but say they will forever carry the scars of a traumatic childhood with them.

At what was termed a “friends and survivors” picnic Saturday, Jessop and Nicholson joined K. Dee Ignatin, executive director of Americans Against Abuses of Polygamy (AAAP), at Glenmore Park. The event was held to invite the public to discuss polygamy with women who have experienced it firsthand. Jessop has written a book on her life with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the same sect that owns the now-famous YFZ Ranch in Schleicher County.

The FLDS, which believes polygamy brings glorification in heaven, is a breakaway sect of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which renounced polygamy more than a century ago.

Ignatin said Americans should not be fooled by what she says is the media’s incorrectly favorable portrayal of the polygamist lifestyle. The women’s tour was prompted in part by featured treatment of the YFZ Ranch group on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

“It’s true of the Taliban and it’s true of the FLDS,” Ignatin said. “Every instance of polygamy in any culture always forces women and children into poverty, restricts women’s choices, travel, and education, leads to the molestation of both boys and girls, and results in child brides.”

Source/Full Story: gosanangelo.com

I’m thinking of hosting a debate where similar questions are raised concerning attorneys, because we all know what they are like, don’t we…

Source: Salt Lake Tribune

Should the state prosecute polygamous parents and remove their children from their homes?
That question will be vetted by Marci A. Hamilton and Kirk Torgensen on Wednesday during the 25th annual Jefferson B. Fordham debate at the University of Utah College of Law. The debate is at 6 p.m. in the Sutherland Moot Courtroom.

Full Story

Source: CNN.com

A polygamist convicted of fatally stabbing his 11-year-old niece and dumping her body in rural Oklahoma was executed Thursday.

Jessie James Cummings Jr., whose personality was once compared to Charles Manson’s, reiterated his innocence before being executed.

“The justice system let me down on this case. It turned a blind eye to truth in this,” Cummings said. “Today, you came here to see an innocent man die.”

Cummings was convicted of killing Melissa Moody, whose skeletal remains were discovered near a Choctaw County bridge in 1991.

In an application for clemency, his attorney, Chris Eulberg, wrote that the conviction was based solely on the uncorroborated testimony of his two wives, Juanita and Sherry Cummings.

Full Story…

Really?

Source: Deseret News

Flora Jessop’s “Church of Lies: The True Story of Escaping Slavery and Polygamy, and Rescuing Women and Children from the Notorious Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints” will hit bookstore shelves in February 2009. It’s being published by Jossey-Bass, a division of Wiley Publishing.

“It’s a book about my life, about what I come from and why I do what I do,” Jessop told the Deseret News on Thursday. “I think that it’s important to know why I do what I do, and for people to know why I’m fighting for these children.”

In the book’s preface, Jessop said she was one of 28 children born to her father and his three wives. At 8, she said she began being sexually abused and tried to run away throughout her teenage years. She finally left the church about 20 years ago, enduring a rough life until she became an advocate for abused children in polygamy.

Jessop now heads the Phoenix-based Child Protection Project, where she has helped women and children seeking to leave the FLDS communities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz. She once proclaimed she’d be willing to go to jail for harboring runaways, if it meant protecting children from abuse.

From the Salt Lake Tribune

The U.S. Attorney for Utah and the head of the FBI’s Salt Lake City field office said Thursday there should be no rush to establish a federal task force on polygamous crimes because existing partnerships already offer cross-agency cooperation.
“What’s also lost in this debate is let’s not ignore that just announcing a task force doesn’t give you probable cause to launch an investigation and it doesn’t allow you to ignore constitutional protections,” U.S. Attorney for Utah Brett Tolman said in an interview.
Tim Fuhrman, the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s field office in Salt Lake City, said local agencies seem to be satisfied with the efforts so far and a task force won’t necessarily solve any problems.
“In many of our investigations we work with state and local agencies” Fuhrman said. “I don’t see the need to go beyond that working relationship that we have right now and that exists with those partners.”

Here we have an opinion, and it’s rather interesting, when one considers the blatant errors in the “facts”, such as Warren Jeffs being convicted of rape…that is incorrect; or that he is facing “polygamist charges” in Arizona…that is incorrect also.  It makes one wonder what else is incorrect, other than the logic.

Polygamist leader Warren Jeffs is set to have his Arizona hearing on May 19.

Jeffs, 52, faces four counts of sexual conduct with a minor and four counts of incest. He is accused of arranging marriages between teenage girls and adult males in Utah and Arizona.

I don’t really see how being accused of underage incest marriages is anything more than a pretense considering he is a Fundamentalist LDS church leader and was already convicted of two counts of rape in Utah. I think I can pretty much say, without assumption, that he is guilty.

Opinion inFull

Without assumption, huh ? Whatever happened to “innocent until proven guilty” ? For Megan, it obviously is “guilty, no need for further proof”… We wonder if she wished to have the same standard applied to her.

Well, it is obvious that she speaks without talking, therefore it is safe to assume that she is an uneducated twit whose opinion isn’t worth the electrons used to spread it. But for the sake of truth and justice we will comment more on her opinion later on anyhow.

Via the Deseret Morning News- Read the full story

BOUNTIFUL — The words stand out amid the signs for new houses and fast food.

“Escape polygamy.”

From Ogden to St. George, billboards are popping up in an evangelical Christian ministry’s efforts to reach out to those seeking to leave polygamy.

“It’s an awareness campaign for people to know that someone is there and to give them this number,” said Doris Hanson of A Shield & Refuge Ministries, which is behind the billboards.

Hanson is starting the campaign as part of her ministry’s efforts to reach out to people dealing with abuse and neglect in polygamous communities and provide help through provisions, education and prayer.

“We will provide anything we can to help someone leave,” she said in an interview with the Deseret Morning News.

A Shield & Refuge Ministries was born, in part, out of Hanson’s own experiences in polygamy, which she called “abusive emotionally.” Hanson said when she finally left the Kingston group in 1964, she had few people willing to help her.

Technorati Tags: polygamy, plural marriage, Winston Blackmore, FLDS, A Shield & Refuge Ministries

Deseret Morning News | Fall Arizona trial expected for Jeffs

KINGMAN, Ariz. — The Mohave County attorney said he estimates a fall trial in the cases remaining against Fundamentalist LDS Church leader Warren Jeffs.Jeffs, 52, seemed to be in better spirits as he smiled to his supporters when he entered the courtroom on Wednesday morning, wearing prison garb with a camouflaged bulletproof vest.
At the case management hearing, Mohave County Judge Steven F. Conn alerted Mohave County Attorney Matt Smith and Jeffs’ defense attorney, Michael Piccarreta, to the ruling dismissing with prejudice a 2005 case at the request of the state.
After a witness in the case indicated that she would not testify against Jeffs, Smith filed a motion to dismiss it. Jeffs still faces four counts of sexual conduct with a minor and four counts of incest in two separate cases accusing him of arranging marriages between teenage girls and adult male followers in the Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, area.