in 2005.

“During the debate on same-sex ‘marriage,’ when Liberal Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler adamantly testified that polygamy would not be an issue, everyone knew very well that it would be,” Canadian lawyer Gwen Landolt, national director of REAL Women of Canada, told Lifesite News Service Aug. 2.

“If you can break down the laws guarding heterosexual marriage between a man and a woman, then anything can happen,” said Landolt. “If you can have a partner of the same sex, then logically you can have two or three of the opposite sex.”

Landolt confirmed her comments when contacted by the National Catholic Register Aug. 16.

Landolt’s perspective is shared by National Review Online Editor Stanley Kurtz. Writing in February 2006, Kurtz reported that two studies commissioned by Canada’s Justice Ministry during the debate over same-sex “marriage” had recommended the decriminalization of polygamy.

Kurtz said that if the debate over polygamy in Canada were limited to the actions of the Bountiful community – or pressure from Canadian Muslims, whose religion formally allows men to have multiple wives – there would be little chance of its legalization.

But Kurtz noted that Martha Bailey, author of one of the Justice Ministry studies advocating decriminalization of polygamy, “directly links her legal argument on polygamy to same-sex ‘marriage.’”

Said Kurtz, “Canada’s socially liberal legal elites are just using the ‘gay marriage’ movement, fundamentalist Mormons, and Muslim immigrants to get what they’re truly after: the slow-motion abolition of marriage.”

According to Kurtz, the situation in Canada with respect to polygamy is “a preview of the argument we’ll be having should same-sex ‘marriage’ be fully established here in the United States.”

Landolt agreed with Kurtz in her comments to Lifesite News Service.

“If polygamy is upheld in Canada, how long will it take to be upheld around the world?” she said. “As the same-sex ‘marriage’ has turned out to be, it’s an international problem.”

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Steve Weatherbe, based in Victoria, Canada, is a correspondent for National Catholic Register.