Kristyn Decker, 2:00 PM-2:50 PM
Friday, June 24th
“I was born and raised in, and lived polygamy before I finally found freedom and genuine happiness. For 28 years of my life, my father was the Prophet of the AUB cult, centered in Murray, Utah. My mother was the first of his 13 wives and I was number 12 of his 23 biological children. While on my way out, I obtained a B.A. in Education. After I escaped, I published my first auto biography, Fifty Years in Polygamy – Big Secrets and Little White Lies. With many speaking engagements, book tours, and helping victims who wanted to leave, came the necessity to establish the Sound Choices Coalition: Informing Society of the Realities of Polygamy and Advocating FOR its victims. Because of these things and much more, I’d like to talk about the amazing “findings” in the 2009 Canadian Court Case against polygamy. Chief Justice Bauman finds polygamy “as harmful to women and children and to society at large, and even to the very foundation of democracy itself.” In 2009 a team of lawyers from the federal and provincial governments, along with a handful of allied public-interest groups, set out to prove the experts wrong and to show there were devastating harms that inevitably flowed from polygamy’s “cruel arithmetic”. The case against polygamy would proceed for almost two years, and was laid out through forty-four days of trial and more than 100 witnesses. The evidence ranged from the testimony of pre-eminent academics to stark and disturbing confessions of polygamists testifying under the shield of anonymity. The eventual (2011), 357-page decision of the Chief Justice based on “the most comprehensive judicial record on the subject ever produced,” finds ‘that the harm against women and children outweighs concerns over protecting religious freedom.’
Register: https://whova.com/web/icsaa_202207/