Post edited 12:29 pm – August 31, 2010 by jbash

Note: there's a revised version of this further down the thread, and that's what you should be looking at. It may move to the head of its own thread soon; if it does I'll do something to make it obvious where to look and comment. — jbash 2010-AUG-31.

THIS IS NOT ADOPTED POLICY. In fact, many CPAA members and volunteers have not seen it. It's here to stimulate community input. Is it on the right track? If so, what should be changed? If not, where should we go?

Basic position

Consensual, egalitarian polyamorous relationships, including conjugal relationships, are equal in value and dignity to monogamous relationships, and should be treated in the same way.

The number of people involved in a conjugal, romantic, or sexual relationship is not a valid criterion for determining the social value of that relationship, or for defining the official support or restrictions to be applied to it.

All significant negatives which occur in polyamorous relationships also occur in monogamous ones.

The presence of multiple partners in a conjugal relationship cannot properly be used as a proxy for coercion, invalid consent, or abuse of any other kind. These are amenable to direct observation, and should be observed directly.

Recommendations

1. Section 293 of the Criminal Code of Canada should be repealed immediately, and is in any case invalid because of conflicts with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. [What about 290 and 291 (bigamy?)]

    

Actually, the plan after this consultation was to come up with "short statement[s] geared toward the general public" based on our policy positions. The idea of the consultation itself was to get unambiguous descriptions of where we wanted to go, aimed at an audience of people interested in the issues (and of policy makers). A platform, if you will.

So, the general plan is:

1. Get an idea of where the interested members of the poly community would like us to go.
2. Write fairly technical statements based on that.
3. Use those to write more "popular" statements, which will presumably take a bunch of forms.

We're really at step 1. The draft is something like what we might produce at step 2, but it exists mostly to elicit input.

So I think it's premature to worry about people who are looking at the issue for the first time, or about people who may not completely get all the concepts.

Separate from the question of audience or emphasis, my personal opinion is that we need to avoid being legalistic in our broadest policies, for example by treating the Charter as the main source of our moral authority. We use the Charter in court because it's the applicable law, and courts deal in laws. We can use the Charter in rhetoric because it expresses a Canadian commitment to values that strengthen our cause. But when we're talking about how things should be in an absolute sense, I think we should limit our reliance on the Charter. If there were no Charter, we'd still be in the right.

Karen, I know that your message above was posted because you knew that the comment period would be coming to an end.

At this point, the procedure requires an up or down decision on the text exactly as it stands. We can't modify the proposal without starting a new comment period.

The basic problem is that CPAA internal people were given notice this afternoon that the text under consideration was the original one, and that they had until Monday to consider that text. There were no objections to that procedure or timetable on the CPAA mailing lists before the set deadline, so the procedure stands.

It's still possible to make modifications. To do that within the procedure we're committed to, we can treat your post as an objection to the text as it stands, let this consultation period run out, propose revised text, and give notice and a fair period for objections to the changed version.

There's nothing wrong with doing that, but I need to be sure that's what you want to do. Do you intend your post as a formal objection to our adopting the original text, without your suggested change?

Here are my responses to all the comments so far.

The next post is a new suggestion, which I hope will address all of them,
at least as far as I think they can or should be addressed.

Karen D:

I've suggested different wording. I'd like to avoid implying that criminal law should be the main government response to abuse. The patriarchal polygyny statement has more detailed recommendations, and those try to deemphasize criminalization as well. From what I hear about the situation on the ground in Bountiful, for example, I doubt any criminal law will be very productive there, at least not as a primary strategy. It's not a very effective way to break indoctrination.

I'm not satisfied with what I have. Both my and your version are really too vague for the "recommendations" section. Each of the draft statements has recommendations. The idea was that they should describe specific actions for the government or others to take, in a way clear enough to make it obvious exactly what we wanted them to do, and leaving no room for debate. I think that's especially critical for any recommendation for a change to the law.

I'd like to hear suggestions for making the recommendations more "actionable". The ones on the patriarchal polygyny statement have the same problem, although I think it's less critical there because they're not legislative recommendations.

By the way, you said we should be "sympathetic to the intent behind the law". Whenever I hear that, I feel the need to mention that the original intent of section 293 had little or nothing to do with addressing individualized abuse. That's what its advocates want to use it for today, but the values and viewpoints of the times when it was passed were very different than those of today. People then may have cared about abuse, but their overriding concerns were preserving a stable set of social rules and showing the Mormons who was boss… and those are the concerns that show up in the legislative history. This is a legally important point as well as a historically important one.

cchanteuse:

Point by point:

1. How are we treating it as an internal document?

2. I would be willing to consider removing all discussion of abuse from this statement and putting it in the patriarchal polygyny statement, but I suspect that others, probably including Karen, would not. And I'm not sure I'd be entirely comfortable myself.

3. Since I haven't seen exactly what background you mean, I may be off base, but I've been trying not to put background into the policy statements. I believe it deemphasizes our actual positions, and leads to confusion between the positions and the background. Each document has a specific audience and a specific purpose, and I think background belongs in white papers or FAQs.

I get the impression that you're afraid that these will be taken out of context. They probably will be. My counter is that somebody who's bent on taking you out of context will do so anyway. They'll happily take a single sentence from a long document and present that out of context. The longer a position statement is, the more chance somebody like that has to pull out some little snippet and spin it in a misleading way… and say that it came from our "fundamental policy".

Harmonic Spoke:

Responding to quoted stuff from your post:

Laws must guard against abuse in relationships but the presence of multiple partners in a conjugal relationship is not evidence of coercion, invalid consent, or other abuse.

I would be more comfortable adding the first part of your sentence to the second part of mine, as in the new draft in the next post.

I'm uncomfortable with "… is not evidence of…" as opposed to "cannot properly be used as a proxy for…". The reason is that "is not evidence of" relies on questions of fact which aren't well established.

We have no good numbers, but one could imagine there really being a statistical association between multiple conjugal partners and abuse. I'd be amazed if that there were one in the community that identifies with the word "polyamorous". In fact, I suspect we have less coercion and undue influence than the general population, and possibly less of other forms of abuse as well. However, as our opponents are quick to remind us, there's patriarchal polygyny out there. There's evidence that patriarchal polygyny, especially when it's the "isolated, totalizing religious community" kind, bears an association with abuse.

Depending on the relative numbers of polyamorists and patriarchal polygynists (which nobody knows), that could mean that, in Canadian society as a whole, you might find a positive statistical correlation between multiple partner conjugal relationships and abuse. Thus, from a statistician's point of view, multiple conjugality could look like a sort of "evidence" of abuse… if that were the only information you had. It would be very weak evidence. It would be based on conditions that are likely to change as polyamory becomes more dominant numerically, which I believe it probably will. But you could still call it evidence.

What I'm trying to say with the "proxy" language is that, even if there were a statistical association, it wouldn't matter for public policy. Firstly, the association definitely isn't remotely strong enough to justify either messing up poly people's lives, or giving mono people a free pass. Secondly, even if the association were very strong, it would still be possible to look for the abuse directly, which would give vastly better accuracy in identifying problems as well as being vastly fairer.

It's pretty well established that, in free and democratic societies, we ignore certain statistical associations in the interests of liberty and justice. We address harmful acts themselves, not behaviour that may sometimes be related to harmful acts. Polyamorists (and indeed patriarchal polygynists) have a legitimate claim to that same consideration, regardless of the numbers. We don't, and shouldn't have to, prove anything about statistics, and I don't want us to seem to admit that we should.

I would also like to keep the "All significant negatives…" sentence/paragraph. I don't think it says the same thing as the following paragraph. It's a statement of fact, and the following paragraph is a consequence of it and other facts.

However, I do agree that there's some redundancy between the paragraphs in what I originally wrote, and have tried to clean that up a little. It's kind of tricky because even genuinely distinct issues tend to overlap conceptually.

All laws and policies that criminalize or discriminate against conjugal relationships with multiple partners must be repealed as they conflict with the Freedom of Association as guaranteed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

I can accept broadening the recommendations beyond section 293.

The reason I didn't originally make them broader was to keep them hard-edged and specific. Rather than tell the government "repeal all laws like this, and you get to decide which laws those are", I was trying to say "repeal this specific language, right here". I still think that it's much better for the recommendations section to be specific in that way, and that we'd be better off to go and research the exact changes we want than to make broad statements that could be open to further interpretation.

I think this desire for extreme clarity in the recommendations may not have been as obvious as it might have been, because of my including "and is in any case invalid…". That's really a statement of fact, not a recommendation for action. I put it in for legal strategy reasons. We don't want to be seen as making any statement that might suggest that section 293 was valid law. Just asking for 293 to be repealed, without further explanation, could be interpreted that way.

Anyway, if others disagree about the importance of specificity, and if we can't find a way to both cover their concerns and make it hard-edged, I'm willing to make the recommendations a bit softer.

I would object strongly to your specific text, for the following reasons:

1. The main reason for repealing the laws is that they're wrong, not that they conflict with the Charter.

2. If the Charter were the entire issue, there would be no pressing need to repeal the laws at all, since they're automatically void anyway, as we hope the court will confirm. They need to be repealed because they make the wrong statement and confuse people.

3. The conflict with the Charter goes way beyond freedom of association. Freedom of association is one part of Charter section 2. Section 293 also conflicts with the freedom of conscience and religion part of section 2, with section 7 fundamental justice in two or three major ways, with section 15 freedom from discrimination, and with section 27 multiculturalism. Other laws and policies penalizing poly probably have similar broad-based conflicts with the Charter.

In my new suggestion, I've put in a separate line item for other laws, to avoid muddying the waters around the specific and absolute unacceptability of section 293.

Spousal and family laws, as well as pubic policies, must be revised to accommodate multi-partnered families allowing benefits, rights, and obligations to be possible for all partners.

I think this one is really too loose for the recommendations section… it's really not easy to figure out how exactly the government would do that.

In fact, I'm pretty sure we don't have poly community consensus on what exactly should be done with the law in this area. Some people say that the government should abolish all recognition of marriage. Others want certain kinds of recognition, but not others. Others want a "menu" of commitments. Others probably want things I haven't even thought of.

I've even heard from poly people who are actually comfortable with the status quo in terms of benefits and obligations. I don't know how many of them there are, but their numbers may be significant. So I don't know if we'd have consensus on any recommendation at all, even if we allowed ourselves to be vague.

I personally agree with you. Nondiscrimination is a logical consequence of the equal dignity of poly and monogamous relationships. But we're supposed to represent the community, so I don't think we should take positions where the community doesn't speak with a clear voice.

This is addressed directly in the consultation on official poly marriage ("marriage" should be read broadly here…). The recommendation in that draft is that the government should study exactly what it would mean to grant recognition… thus giving the poly community something concrete to form opions about.

Other

I've started to see a distinction in the blogosphere (and not just the poly blogosphere) between everybody being in some sense part of a single big relationship, or everybody having a relationship with everybody else in a group, and one person may having multiple possibly independent relationships. This is something we've talked about a little in the CPAA, but it's not a distinction we've felt we had to pay a lot of attention to. Since people are now talking about it, I've changed the wording to make it clear we support both cases.

Procedural question: Should we be creating a forum thread for each new suggested text, and closing discussion on suggestions that have been abandoned or had revised versions created? Or should we just keep it all in this thread? I'm afraid people will get confused about what exact text is being discussed.