Why Polygamy should be prosecuted

By: Flora Jessop executive director at The Child Protection Project, and K. Dee Ignatin, executive director at Americans Against Abuses of Polygamy

Polygamy is unconstitutional because it is a human rights violation against women and children. Polygamy is a Felony. Polygamy has been studied in multiple countries around the world. The results of dozens of studies by medical and mental health professionals all reflect the negative impact polygamy has worldwide. Polygamy statistically leads to higher incidences of poverty, molestation, child and spouse abandonment, incest, child brides, depression, welfare fraud and divorce. Polygamy is the largest gateway to the Islamic practice of Sharia law in our country. Legally recognizing one religious right to abuse will naturally lead to others. If Muslims have the right to plural marriage, because of culture or religion, why are they not also entitled to subject their children to molestation and child marriages because of it? Allowing polygamy to remain in practice without prosecution sends a powerful message to those within polygamy that our laws only apply if they want to abide by them. Fundamentalist Mormons say, We are law abiding citizens except for this one felony we are committing. Mormon Fundamentalist as well as Muslim polygamists show a flagrant disregard for U.S. law in favor of their own culture of abuse, justified by their religion. As a free nation governed by laws, we cannot allow small groups of people to form independent operational theocracies where the rights of women and children are trampled in the name of religious freedom. America should not encourage immigrant cultures to hold on to, rather than let go of traditions which infringe on the human rights of women and children. 70% of Muslim women who are first wives say their spouse took the second wife without their knowledge or consent, even though that is never supposed to happen in Islam. How can we as Americans look at the women coming to our shores from countries where they never

dreamed of the right even to uncover their faces and say, "Here too, when your husband wants to bring another woman home, there is nothing you can do but live with it, because we are such a tolerant people. American Muslim polygamy has only started to grow and yet it already exceeds the estimated 38,000 fundamentalist Mormons engaging in the practice today. It took the fundamentalist Mormons 100 years to get here, yet it has taken Muslims in America less than a single generation to overtake them. Refusing to prosecute polygamy will open the floodgates for Sharia based Muslim polygamy to grow to European levels here in the United States, quickly. The Attorney General has a duty to prosecute crime and yet in Utah and Arizona both have conspired with law breakers to better facilitate their criminal practices. The insult to law-abiding citizens of these states by this stance is egregious and only furthers the pattern and practice of abuse within polygamy. Should polygamy be prosecuted? Yes. To do anything else opens Pandora's Box, and the results will be vast and disastrous to American culture, as well as childrens and womens rights.