A Veto Over Someone Else's Marriage

This blog argues for relationship rights for all adults, including the freedom of an adult to marry any and all consenting adults. This blog strongly condemns abuse, especially preying on children. Lovemaking and sex between adults are entirely different things than assault and molestation of children.

Unfortunately, false accusations of assault or molestation are sometimes made for various reasons, such as to gain an upper hand in a custody dispute. One of the truly awful things about false allegations is that they can make things more difficult for the many people are are actually abused, who already have more than enough to deal with.

I have been witnessing the pain of an Australian woman being denied her freedom to marry the man she loves.

It is a long story, but I will try to keep it simple.

Her fiancé is serving time in Australia. Here in the US, murderers who will never be let out of prison are allowed to marry. This particular prisoner is not serving time for murder. I’ll get back to that.

In Australia, the correctional authorities have to approve marriages for prisoners, and in this case, they are considering denying these two adults their right to marry, and they haven’t been getting a reason as to why. Unless that permission is granted, they will not be free to marry as long as he’s in prison.

The want-to-be bride has received notice that her fiancé is being denied the right to visits from the bride’s children (his stepchildren-to-be). One reason they gave was the bride’s criminal record. (Her “crime” consisted of making love with another consenting adult.) The children are in her custody either way. Why would her criminal record be used as a reason to deny his right to see her children?

Let’s get to why he is incarcerated.

His ex accused him of sodomizing her pre-teen son, an extremely serious accusation, to be sure.

He plead not guilty and has steadily maintained his innocence. Medical examinations on the boy showed that the boy had not been penetrated. With no other evidence, a jury convicted the husband-to-be based on the testimony of his ex and the boy. The bride-to-be, who is an intelligent woman whose first priority is her children, has scoured the files and transcripts over and over again and finds nothing that concerns her about her fiancé. The accusers changed their stories many times. The husband-to-be is from a wealthy family and the ex wanted some of that money, which could be some of the motivation to make false charges.

The bride-to-be has talked frankly with her own children to tell them the whole story and made it clear that if they ever felt uncomfortable around the husband-to-be, they were to tell her immediately. But their interactions with him were positive and they can’t believe he would do the crime of which he was accused and later convicted. In fact, one of the children, now an adult, was the first to visit him in jail (it took his bride-to-be longer to get approval to visit). That stepdaughter-to-be supports him and writes him weekly.

Because the convicted husband-to-be maintains his innocence, including appealing his conviction, he may not make parole and may have to serve the full term. Either way, as long as he is incarcerated, the authorities have a veto over whether or not these two people can marry.

The authorities are also saying he will not be allowed to come home to the children and his bride-to-be when he is released.

So what we have is yet another example of how consenting adults are being denied their right to marry. They had planned to marry after the trial because they were not expecting that he would be convicted and incarcerated, but he was. And now the authorities might deny his freedom to marry now and could essentially deny their freedom to marry for a long time after he serves his sentence.

To help with the general issues raised in this post, consider joining the page Prisoners Rights Within Australia.


Here's an update.