Posted on 06/01/2008 9:08:54 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
The annulment of a young Muslim couple’s marriage because the bride was not a virgin has caused anger in France, prompting President Sarkozy’s party to call for a change in the law.
The decision by a court in Lille was condemned by the Government, media, feminists and civil rights organisations after it was reported in a legal journal on Thursday. Patrick Devedjian, leader of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement, said it was unacceptable that the law could be used for religious reasons to repudiate a bride. It must be modified “to put an end to this extremely disturbing situation”, he said.
The case, which had previously gone unreported, involved an engineer in his 30s, named as Mr X, who married Ms Y, a student nurse in her 20s, in 2006. The wedding night party was still under way at the family’s home in Roubaix when the groom came down from the bedroom complaining that his bride was not a virgin. He could not display the blood-stained sheet that is traditionally exhibited as proof of the bride’s “purity”.
Mr X went to court the following morning and was granted a annulment on the grounds that his bride had deceived him on “one of the essential elements” of the marriage. In disgrace with both families, she acknowledged that she had led her groom to believe that she was a virgin when she had already had sexual intercourse. She did not oppose the annulment.
Critics ran out of superlatives to condemn what they depicted as a dangerous aberration. Valérie Létard, Minister for Women’s Rights, said that she was “shocked to see that today in France the civil law can be used to diminish the status of women”.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Government shouldn’t be involved in recognizing marriages at all. As long as they are, though, annulling a marriage on the grounds of ANY sort of fraud doesn’t strike me as a problem. If this bride represented to her would-be husband that she was a virgin, and he married her in the belief that she had told the truth, under basic contract law, the contract is null and void. Same concept would apply if a man represented to a prospective bride that he was very wealthy, and she discovered after the wedding that all the fancy cars and homes he’d used to convince her of this were actually on loan from friends, and he was actually up to ears in debt, marriage contract should be null and void, just like any business contract in which one party had used to fraud to induce the other party to enter into the contract.
“He could not display the blood-stained sheet that is traditionally exhibited as proof of the bride’s “purity”.
That is flat-out gross! What country would want people like that living in its boundries?
“What country would want people like that living in its boundries?”
US, Canada, all of Europe, Australia... Fill in the blanks.
Does the man have to be a virgin?
Does he have to prove it?
Yup. Somehow we’ve gone from thinking that sexual misdeeds should be treated more strictly than others, to thinking they should be treated the same, to the notion that deceit and perjury don’t matter if they involve sex in any way.
Well,...they don’t wait for an invite.
I haven’t heard it for a while, but there used to be a phrase right here in the West: “double standard.”
That was mostly resolved in the secular culture by dropping the rules for both parties.
I wonder if the groom was a virgin?
I wonder if the groom was a virgin?
Sorry, I thought that was the implication of your response. She was impartial to getting a disease because she didn’t inquire into his state of virginity.
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