If you’re not a virgin, your marriage never happened

A French court has annulled a marriage between a Muslim man and woman because she lied about being a virgin. From the Times:

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.

Many people across France and the world, including the ruling party of President Sarkozy, have condemned this judgment as a way to use the law to invade women’s privacy and discriminate in religious contexts:

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”.

I guess the take-home lesson from these events is that if a woman lies about her history of sexual activity, her marriage never happened as far as the French courts are concerned. What a shocking and sad violation of human rights.