The Age editorializes about the Muslim push to legalize polygamy in Australia. “Gender equality and polygamy are not compatible,” June 27:
[…] As The Age has argued before, there are fundamental values that must be accepted by all who live in this society if the broader diversity is to be sustained. Among those core values is an acceptance of the civil equality of men and women, and that equality would not be possible if men were allowed to take more than one wife. (The same consideration would preclude a change in the law allowing women to take more than one husband, although no one has publicly argued for polyandry.)
As Ms El Matrah noted, women in polygamous marriages suffer emotionally and psychologically, and in practice their property rights and capacity to earn a livelihood are compromised. It might be argued that in some other societies legal polygamy serves to protect these things, but that is not the way it could be expected to function in Australia in 2008. If the law were amended to regularise the status of the very few refugee families affected, how might it be exploited by others who do not come into this category? As Sherene Hassan, a spokeswoman for the Islamic Council of Victoria, has said: “Fourteen hundred years ago it was altruism. These days the motivation behind polygamy is probably less honourable.”
Probably!