Lisa Schiffren writes:
My piece here tells the story of Moussa Magassa, an illegal immigrant from Mali of various occupations, who came to the attention of the New York media, city government and readers nationally last year when he lost several children in a tragic fire exactly one year ago. It turned out that he had been living quite nicely, with both of his wives and all of their children in the house that burned. Mr. Magassa's family has grown quite a bit in the intervening year — and not just the usual ways.
It also turns out that there is a large community of West Africans here in New York who have brought with them their Islamic practice and tribal culture of polygamous marriage to the U.S. They bring in additional wives on false visas, they hide the practice, and the mediating institutions of the state, which should be inculcating our cultural practices and laws— welfare bureaucracies, schools, fire departments — turn a blind eye because
they do not wish to deal with this practice, despite the harms and loss of freedoms to at least some of the women involved. Why not? Because acknowledging the practice would require legal action: polygamy is grounds for deportation, (and a jail sentence.) This willing disregard of the law by everyone from the Mayor on down is a step by step enactment of "Sharia creep," as Mark Steyn calls it. It is also a direct result of the government's complicity in illegal immigration.
The 1856 GOP platform spoke directly of the "twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery." We fought a bloody war to end slavery, and the federal government undertook a decade's long legal enforcement effort to eradicate polygamy among Mormons a few years later, capped by the 1879 Supreme Court case Reynolds vs. the U.S.. To this day, when the government uncovers cases of slavery, it takes vigorous action, including jail time and deportations. Unless we wish to become like Western Europe — colonized, and forced to support, with our tax dollars, laws and practices we find abhorrent — it's time to take similar action when we uncover cases of polygamy.