Commentary: Comeback of polygamy?

GURAT, France, March 3 (UPI) -- 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.

This is shown in the Bible, where the trajectory runs from the toleration of polygamy in some parts of the Old Testament to Jesus' clear words that only two make "one flesh" -- the "twain," meaning a man and his wife (Mark 10:2-8).

And in the Muslim world, Tunisia's landmark decision in 1956 to ban ménages with multiple wives and allow only monogamous unions was hailed by women's rights activists as a great progress and will doubtless be commemorated as such at its 50th anniversary next year.

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."

In the United States, such a challenge proved unsuccessful last month when U.S. district Judge Ted Stewart ruled in Salt Lake City that the state "has an interest in the practice of monogamous marriage."

Stewart thus dismissed a lawsuit by a man and two women to have their "union" recognized by the state. In 1894, Mormon-dominated Utah banned polygamy as a precondition for statehood.

The trio had based their lawsuit on last year's ruling by the United States Supreme Court overturning Texas' sodomy laws.

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.

The town of Les Mureaux in the French department of Yvelines near Paris is desperately trying to dissolve households with multiple wives.

As a spokeswoman for the town's local government explained, the campaign focuses on 80 polygamous families with altogether 1,000 children. Some of these families numbering 20 persons live in 800-square-foot government-supported apartments.

How come those second, third and fourth wives were allowed to join their "husbands" where monogamy is the law?

"They were allowed in because they had 'French' children, meaning children of residents of France," explained a social worker in a recent interview.

Next door, in Germany, a Turkish-born woman charged Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's government with furthering the "undignified treatment of immigrant women, including polygamy" by recognizing "arranged" marriages based on contracts concluded outside the country.

In a book, Necla Kelek described how she herself had escaped from her family and how her father had broken into her apartment, almost strangling her to death. She accused the government's lax immigration policies, which are currently a major topic of this nation's political discourse, of transforming Germany into a "Dar al-Islam" -- a "House of Islam," where Islam will ultimately prevail both politically and spiritually.

Kelek's book, "Die fremde Braut" (The Alien Bride) came out at a time when Germans were particularly shaken by the news that at least six young women of Turkish extraction have been killed by close males relatives because they had "dishonored" their families by behaving like regular German girls. In other words, they had become Westernized in lifestyle and appearance.

According to Christine Schirrmacher, president of the Bonn-based Institute for Islamic Studies, as many as 40 such slayings were recorded in Germany in recent years.

Seen from this perspective, the practice of polygamy in Western nations may seem benign when compared with the ongoing killing and mutilation of Muslim women on European soil.

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?