Congress Protests: Handicapped People Not Permitted Marriage in Peru

[Judi Lynn]

Source: LIP-ir

30 July, 2007 < 12:00 >

Congress Protests: Handicapped People Not Permitted Marriage in Peru

(LIP-ir) -- An article in Peru's Civil Code, which has been in effect since 1984, states that deaf and blind people can not legally be married.

The article is now being questioned by those in congress that advocate the rights of handicapped people.

According to Article 241 - Section 4 in Peru's Civil Code, deaf and blind people, that can not undoubtedly express their will, can not get married.

The Code further states that the right to make such decisions is given exclusively to people over the age of 18, that are not included in Article, referring to people with partial or complete handicaps.


Read more: http://www.livinginperu.com/news/4371

[LiberalEsto]

1. Their congress or ours?

And if it's our Congress, someone please remind them that we're in dire need of impeachments to save our democracy. No big rush, just whenever they feel like getting around to it.:sarcasm:

[Judi Lynn]

2. I should have cleared that up! Sorry. It's THEIRS.

[LiberalEsto]

3. Whew!

Thanks. I was suddenly getting a tad more irritated than usual at that batch of cowards in the Capitol.

[CanonRay]

4. Isn't this in the Republican Party platform?

[rocktivity]

5. Deaf and blind people who cannot "undoubtedly express their will"?

What the heck does that mean? Undoubtedly express their will to do (or not do) WHAT? Do the deaf have to be able to write or use sign language in order to marry? Do the deaf have to know Braille? And what about people with speech impediments--isn't is discriminatory to exempt them?

:crazy:
rocknation

[Judi Lynn]

6. It's so completely ODD! Why would anyone think they wanted to be married

if they didn't communicate it to them somehow? Holy smokes!

The first thing that occured to me was they're conducting a form of eugenics, operating from the idea that they'll have disabled children, trying to apply the _Bush pre-emptive technique.

[struggle4progress]

7. Or it might have been intended as a protection: if the girl can't clearly

consent, she can't be traded off as a "wife" in some backroom deal.

Certain disabilities can heighten the risk of sexual abuse in certain contexts.

I once worked in an institution where there was a physically attractive young woman in her twenties who was blind, deaf, and (either through disability or lack of appropriate early care) almost completely unable to communicate. It's not hard to imagine, that if someone offered to "marry" such a person, in a subsistence economy, some parents, having a number of other mouths to feed, might consider the offer on purely economic grounds.

The consensus of staff regarding another woman in the same institution was that she would have been functional enough to live independently, had she not been repeatedly been the victim of sexual predation in adolescence.

Someone once pointed out to me, that what was (in the past) a great civilizing step forward tends to become (in the future) a mere barbarism: slavery was the given example, with the claim that prior to the invention of slavery in the ancient world the victors in war often cannibalized the defeated.