A French judge has found that a woman's lying about her virginity is sufficient grounds for annulment. There has been some hooplah about this overseas and Fox News picked up the article in the US.
I don't understand why this is a big deal.
Apparently, French law allows for an annulment where there has been a misrepresentation of facts fundamental to the contractual arrangement. This seems reasonable to me.
Many cultures rate virginity high on their list of factors in selecting marriage partners. If, as happened in this case, one party claims to be a virgin and has had sex before, surely this is something that should have been discussed before the wedding night. Why SHOULD the state intervene to force the couple into divorce proceedings?
It seems to me that lying about virginity, knowing that your fiance DOES care about the issue, is no different than lying about being sterile, knowing that your spouse wants children.
I don't understand why this is an issue.
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What's the language of the law? Is it unisex/non-gender defined?
Can I sue if my husband proclaims his virginity, and I find out later that he lied?
What if he says he has a huuuuge "tract of land," and I( later find out it's more of a pocket park?
The text of the law was not reported.
I gather that the law doesn't contain particular grounds for annulment. It appears that it is a question of "good faith dealings."
In this case, I suspect that if she had told the fiance that she wasn't a virgin and he had married her anyway, the annulment would not have been granted.
This sounds like a classic Reading Pipe case.
So we need to know if for the French, virginity is more like terra novis or a national park.
If it is like terra novis, then virginity is required for substantial performance, because significant rights accrue to the first person on the scene.
If it is like a national park, then virginity is not required for substantial performance, because not being the first person ever to lay foot in a "new" section of the park does not diminish your first experience in the park.
From the account, I figure that the French insist on genuine Reading pipe.
An English-language French news program had a discussion on the annulment issue. It was a Muslim couple who got the annulment, not on the basis of any specific law concerning virginity, but on the basis of Islamic tradition.
The French are up in arms because they see it as an assault on (or affront to) the secular character of the French State. The French Minister of Justice (a daughter of North African immigrants from two different countries) initially welcomed the court's ruling as freeing the woman from an unwanted marriage. In the face of public outrage, however, she reversed her position and pledged to appeal the decision if she could.
My first reaction was to say that the couple should just get a divorce. On second thought, I think that such religiously based objections should be actionable if included in a legally executed pre-nuptial agreement. Of course, the courts would still have discretion, to prevent the application of unreasonable conditions or the unreasonable application of otherwise reasonable conditions.
What would you think if a Jewish man married a woman who said she was Jewish, and therefore would bear him Jewish children, but shortly after the marriage discovered she was a gentile who would not convert, but had a "thing" for Jewish men. The Jewish man could never have Jewish children with a gentile woman, so do you think that an annulment would be reasonable in that case? If so, why not in the Muslim case?
I think that Ipsit-Dixit has it right.
If the court annuled the marriage because the bride was not a virgin, there would be a problem with the application of religious law in a secular court. However, the argument that the marriage contract was rendered null and void by fraud, albiet a fraud that happened to be religious in nature, seems to me to be sound.
Who wanted the annulment? If the women lied about her virginity when they entered into the marriage, and now she wants out because she is not happy about it, should traditional equity principle apply to bar someone benefit from her own lies, assuming France has such a thing?
As I understand it, the husband came down to the celebration and announced that, after consummating the marriage, he had determined that she was not, in fact, a virgin. The girl admitted that she had a prior lover and the man wanted out.
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