If More Mormons Attended University, Would Canada be Okay with Polygamy? Unpacking Literatures of Social Exclusion in Canada’s Continued Criminalization of Polygamy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2011, the British Columbia Supreme Court (BCSC) held it was constitutional to criminalize polygamy, framing the issue as principally about harm. I argue the Reference re: Section 293 of the Criminal Code of Canada furthers a literature of social exclusion, reifying an oversimplified binary: polygamy is harmful, polyamory is moral. Using narrative theory, I explore how these mutually constituted opposites build off each other. Polygamist Mormons are often denied whiteness, seen as an unpatriotic and racialized Other. Mormon women are othered by their attire and, despite still falling under section 293, denied agency. In contrast, the court views polyamory as inherently ethical, citing the Polyamory Advocacy Association’s conceptual definition.The Reference did not create these stereotypes, but it had a rare judicial chance to counter them. Instead, its legal vagueness, especially in terms of the “sanctioning event,” further indicates the court’s prioritizing of stereotypes and retooling of anti-Mormon rhetoric.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".