Hoo boy, this'll be interesting

 BC has it's own branch of the fooked Fundamentalist LDS (a/k/a Mormon) church. It's splintered into 2 groups (one allied with Warren Jeffs, one not), but both practice plural marriage. After rumblings for a number of years, the leaders from both sects have been arrested and charged with polygamy.

This could be a huge can of worms, since some legal experts think the accused with argue religious freedom for entering into plural marriage when all are consenting adults. Article from CBC News follows


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( Article from CBC back here )

 

The CBC has confirmed that Winston Blackmore and James Oler were charged on Tuesday for alleged offences that took place in May 2005 and November 2004.

 

More details are expected to be released Wednesday at a news conference scheduled for noon PT.

 

Blackmore, the one-time bishop of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the rural community in B.C.'s Southern Interior, is rumoured to have fathered about 80 children by his 26 wives.

 

In 2003, Blackmore and about 1,000 other members of the Bountiful community split from the church after rejecting Warren Jeffs, the church's U.S.-based leader, as a prophet. Jeffs then appointed Oler as his leader in the community.

 

In September 2007, a jury in St. George, Utah, convicted Jeffs of being an accomplice to rape for performing a wedding between a man, 19, and a 14-year-old girl.

Past prosecutors reluctant to lay charges

 

In the past, B.C. Crown prosecutors have been reluctant to lay polygamy charges for fear they would be contested on the basis of religious freedom.

 

Special prosecutors Richard Peck and Len Doust both recommended the government get a court ruling on the constitutionality of Canada's polygamy laws before attempting to press charges against men in the polygamous community.

 

But B.C.'s Attorney General Walley Oppal rejected that approach and appointed a third special prosecutor, Terrence Robertson, this past summer to investigate once again if charges should be laid.

 

The results of that investigation are expected to be revealed at the news conference Wednesday.

 

A worthwhile read

While on our cruise I read Kiran Desai's Booker-winning The Inheritance of Loss. And I must say it is a great book and a great read. I did find a couple of bits not to my liking, but even those were a matter of taste rather than quality.

Desai's story is about the detached Indian: those who've embraced the West, English as their first language, and view much of what around them with a sense of distance and displacement. The protagonist is the daughter of 2 such persons, long dead, and lives in the Himalayan hinterland with her maternal grandfather. Sharing their lives are a number of others, including their houseman/cook, a number of equally detached persons, and the odd ex-pat (Swiss, Tibetan, Afghani). The region hold increasing tensions between its indigenous communities and mainstream (ostensibly Hindu) Indian society.

Desai eschews traditional narrative temporality and switches--defty--between the present and past. We learn of her childhood, how her parents met and died, and the circumstances under which her grandfather ends up at OxBridge.  This approach isn't novel, but her ability to weave the inner dialogue of characters into the story is remarkable: often such inner thoughts read incredulously. Alice Munro would be impressed.

This book takes on history, post-colonialism, racism, the caste system, love, and identity. It offers no offensively simplistic explanations for these experiences. But it remains a smart, readable, often wry story. 

Recommended, without reseervation.