Jane Blackmore has remained a reluctant, but powerful voice for change in the polygamous community, always insisting that education is key
The Kingston Whig-Standard
November 15, 2020
Jane Blackmore was gaunt with the hollow eyes of a refugee sitting huddled in a restaurant booth when we first met in 2004.
The ex-wife of Bountiful’s once-powerful bishop, Winston Blackmore, Jane still looked the part of a fundamentalist Mormon wife in a pioneer-styled dress with her hair swooped up from her face and braided in the back.
A registered nurse and midwife, she’d fled the community with her youngest daughter. She wanted to protect her from being placed in a religious marriage before her 18th birthday, as had already happened to Jane’s other two daughters.
Over the years, Jane has remained a reluctant, but powerful voice for change in the polygamous community, always insisting that education is key.
So, it was with interest and some dismay that I read Mary Jayne Blackmore’s recently released book,
Balancing Bountiful: What I Learned About Feminism from My Polygamist Grandmothers.
Mary Jayne has a unique perspective on Bountiful. She’s one of the daughters Jane was forced to leave behind.
Now 37, she’s disavowed fundamentalist Mormonism even though she is principal of Mormon Hills School — an independent school overseen by her father with just over 100 students that last year received $602,023 in government grants.
She also ran for mayor of Creston in 2018, not 2019 as the book’s biography says, finishing a distance third to the incumbent.
As the fifth of the polygamous leader’s 150 children, Blackmore writes that she grew up “in the glory days of Bountiful.”
Her golden-hued memories of ponies, pet lambs and a loving, tight-knit community are only briefly derailed with mentions of darker events — a cousin jailed for sexually abusing his sister and the rapidly increasing number of her father’s wives startlingly close to her in age.
As 2000 neared, fundamentalist Mormons were among the apocalyptic cults preparing for the world to end and its leaders began performing dozens of marriages of under-aged girls.
Despite being the bishop’s daughter and having told her father the name of the boy she wanted to marry, the 17-year-old was given in marriage to the boy’s best friend, a young American man she’d never met.
Two years later, the community suffered its own apocalypse. Her father was ex-communicated. Bountiful’s 1,200 residents split between following Blackmore or sticking with Rulon Jeffs, the prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (and later to his son, Warren).
Mary Jayne’s husband chose the FLDS. Pregnant with their second child, Mary Jayne was bundled into a car and moved to Colorado City, Ariz. where her father-in-law was the brutally efficient police chief and head of the religious police.
Eventually, she returned to Canada, graduated from university, divorced her husband and helped her father establish Mormon Hills School.
Despite its title, the book is as much an apologia for her father as an homage to grandmothers who sacrificed their hopes, dreams and aspirations to be good wives and mothers of Zion or to mothers like hers who risked losing everything in order to fulfil them.
And while her personal quest to define feminism — a curious mix of motherhood and free love — will be of interest to some, it’s her unique perspective on how much Bountiful has changed in the past two decades that’s the bigger draw.
And while Blackmore is entitled to her opinion of how those changes came about, the self-described “debater and an academic” is not entitled to her own facts.
She writes, for example, that Winston Blackmore’s first charges were dropped because “no judge is willing to hear the case.” The second charges proceed, she claims, only after “the Crown has found a judge who is willing to hear Dad’s case.”
Trial judges don’t decide the merits of a case before they hear it, nor do they choose their cases. Surely, even schoolchildren — at least at most accredited schools — would learn this.
She mischaracterizes the purpose of the 2011 constitutional reference case heard in B.C. Supreme Court, a provincial trial court. It could not and did not rewrite the federal Criminal Code’s polygamy section as Blackmore contends.
B.C. Attorney General Mike de Jong — not his predecessor Wally Oppal as Blackmore writes — launched the reference in order get a judge’s opinion on whether the Constitution’s guarantees of freedom of expression and religious freedom extended to the practice of polygamy.
The judge and now Chief Justice Robert Bauman determined that they did not and that polygamy’s harms were a justifiable limit on those freedoms.
Blackmore also errs when she writes that two of her father’s wives were deported in 2005 despite meeting all of the requirements for immigration. They didn’t.
Immigration Canada said at the time that their applications were denied because they lacked special skills and didn’t qualify for student visas to go to college or university because they’d never finished high school.
They skirted the law for more than a decade by taking quick trips down to Utah every six months, restarting the clock on their visitor visas.
At a news conference held in Bountiful before their deportation, Winston Blackmore likened them to “snowbirds.” But unlike Canada retirees who spend winters in the American sun belt, his wives had given birth to at least 10 of his children between them.
The book’s publisher, Caitlin Press, did the first-time author no favours by failing to catch and correct Blackmore’s errors.
But an author’s mistakes are always her own and the work is diminished because of them.
dbramham@postmedia.com
twitter.com/bramham_daphne
https://www.thewhig.com/opinion/columnists/daphne-bramham-a-daughters-view-of-life-from-inside-canadas-most-infamous-polygamous-family/wcm/fd02ee20-7003-4a27-b85c-f027c4e36709 
