Magic Statistics

Polygamists come out of the woodwork in southeastern British Columbia.  Parents belonging to a polygamous sect have taken 16 children out of their religious school and enrolled them at a two-room public school in Yahk.

The 16 new pupils at two-room Yahk Elementary School are wary of strangers in case they are unbelievers, apostates, journalists — anyone their church elders consider evil.

Their mothers, mostly pale and plump with hair swept back in stiff pioneer hairdos, cast their eyes down and evade questions as they pick up their kids. With their polygamous sect divided and one of its leaders wanted by the FBI, the media spotlight is all the more unwelcome.

But not to Rita Palmer. Four of her eight children are among this year's newcomers, and she's eager to set the record straight: "We're normal. We're not brainwashed."

"We're normal."  Right!  Where have we heard this before?  How long before they reject recognition of marriage between one man and one woman as "privileging one particular lifestyle choice", denounce "monogamy-normativity", and demand "polygamy-friendly" lessons in class?

Palmer, 34, and several other mothers of children at Yahk belong to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a sect that quit the Mormon Church in Utah after Mormonism banned polygamy in 1890. Frustrated in the confines of their secretive community, and too busy to home-school their many children, they have done the unthinkable — put their kids into Canada's secular public school system.

They have moved them out of Mormon Hills, the school on their religious compound in Bountiful, whose two leaders are feuding for control and are under investigation on suspicion of sexual abuse and child trafficking.
. . .
"This little school is working as a catalyst of hope," said Linda Allred, Yahk's lone teacher. "The public school policy is to accept everyone — Muslim, Buddhist, Catholics — and they don't question their religion or dress."

"I don't agree with polygamy," she said, but "there are so many other things that are positive about their lifestyle."

I'm sure they're very nice people, but their little cult inculcates a practice that violates Canadian law.  Does the school want to implicate itself in illegality?

Apparently, yes.

John Kettle, director of the administrative district that includes Yahk Elementary, says: "You can't punish the child for their father's sins. I think they're really reaching out and I think the community in Yahk is reaching right back."

Actually, Yahk is reaching into the pockets of BC taxpayers:

The newcomers are Yahk Elementary's salvation. It had only three pupils and needed at least 10 to qualify for public funding. Slated to shut down this school year, it instead got 16 Bountiful kids and 14 more are registered for the coming school year.

Money talks louder than the Criminal Code.  Oh well, it turns out that BC taxpayers have already provided generous funding to the schools in the Mormon compound.

Susie Palmer, Rita's sister, took The Associated Press on a quick tour of the Mormon Hills school, where she is a college-certified art and music teacher. She showed off the school's computer lab and talked about the hot dog sale to raise money for the school band.

A 40-year-old mother of nine children and four grandkids, she says she has no qualms about Rita leaving the compound and sending her children to public school. However, she believes Bountiful's two private schools — Mormon Hills with about 140 pupils, and the Jeffs camp's Bountiful Elementary-Secondary with about 200 — are equally good and deserve their combined $809,485 in public funding this school year.

At this point, I just throw up my hands and say, "Why am I not surprised?"  What a tangled web: from polygamy to officials winking at Criminal Code violations to obtaining public money under dubious pretences.  Marriage and family law is such a mess in this country that I'm not shocked, but I am amazed.

via MarriageDebate.com

Previous related posts:

• Polygamy in real life
• Binks rants

This is Christian Aid Week in the UK, where many Christians believe that vast redistribution of wealth from the West to the Third World will “make poverty history”.  Edward Lucas, writing in The Times of London, argues that this belief is mistaken.  The crucial factor inhibiting long-lasting alleviation of poverty is injustice perpetrated by powerful elites in the Third World.

Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, has shown convincingly how abuse of property rights by the powerful and corrupt prevents subsistence farmers and shantytown dwellers from getting on to the first rung of the wealth-creating ladder. No property rights mean no collateral for loans, no mobility and no investment.

That still eludes much of the anti-poverty lobby. But the prophet Amos, writing three millennia ago, clearly spotted the link between poverty and injustice.

For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins — you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate. 

Without enforceable contracts, the rich and powerful are free to plunder the poor and weak. Debts are uncollectable; assets unprotectable. When Amos mentioned those who “push aside the needy in the gate” he was referring chiefly to law courts but also the route to markets in towns and cities, where the poor and powerless were at the mercy of corrupt gatekeepers. Third World small businesses on the way to market suffer similarly from corrupt bureaucrats and policemen today.

If the exponents of Christian Aid Week are really serious about reducing poverty, says Mr Lucas, they should champion trade liberalisation and the rule of law all across the Third World.  History has shown that those are indispensable elements in creating wealth and raising living standards.  More foreign aid and Western charity alone will not accomplish that.  As long as corrupt and unjust government leaders can oppress and dispossess ordinary citizens at will, broad-based economic improvement is impossible.  That, not insufficient aid from the West, is the fundamental injustice that needs to be overcome.

The Times editorial is based on a sermon that Mr Lucas preached yesterday at Canterbury Cathedral, the full text of which is posted here.

Related story: MYTH: More Foreign Aid Will End Global Poverty, via Acton Institute PowerBlog.

Previous related post: "Little evidence" that foreign aid promotes economic growth.