Penetration without ejaculation can consitute rape. Does anyone know if this standard applies to annullment of marriage?
I don’t think there’s actually any legal requirement a marriage be “consumated”, just that you sign your names on the piece of paper; the rest is just window dressing.
Most of us have what I call a “TV” view of annulment. If a character on TV is tricked into a marriage, once the married couple sleeps together they can’t get an annulment. You see the evil character gloating the next day because he can share her inheritance now, and the only way she can get rid of him is an expensive divorce! Then he laughs evilly and sneaks down to his secret lab. (Well, he does in the shows I watch.)
This isn’t how it works in the real world. I was deeply surprised a few years ago when a friend of mine got an annulment from the father of her child. The fact that they had slept together, and even had a child together, didn’t have any bearing on the annulment. As she explained it, the legally important fact was that they had never lived together, and he had never provided financial support for her or the child. (Yes, he was scum.)
This site has a brief description of annulment. It says the most common basis is fraud. Fraud can include lying about a previous marriage, having an infectious disease, or even lying about the desire not to have children.
http://freeadvice.com/law/545us.htm
I hope this answers your question.
I believe that the folks who make the big deal out of “consummation” vs. “non-consummation” as applied to an annulment are the Catholics. If you are a serious Catholic and you want to get divorced and then be able to re-marry within the Church, you have to get a “non-consummation” annulment, where you basically swear that the marriage was never consummated, i.e. that you never had sex. Is this what the OP is talking about?
I don’t think the catholics care about the consumation part either, at least not as far as anullments go. If the marriage was flawed in the eyes of the church to begin with (based on certain false premises, diminished capacity, etc.) an annullment may be obtained without regard to consummation.
It’s also worth noting that a Catholic annulment and a legal annulment are two different things. A couple whom the church considers annulled may only be divorced legally.
Ha!
My aunt is married to a divorcee. A few years ago, my uncle got an annullment from the Church so they could have a Catholic wedding.
Know how he got it? Try cold hard cash.
Who says the Catholic church isn’t greedy?
I don’t hear anybody saying that.
My parents are divorced in the eyes of the law, and annulled in the eyes of the Catholic Church. In the eyes of both, either of them is free to marry, should they so choose. There’s no distinction in the Catholic Church between annulments: The marriage never happened, so even if there was sex, it wasn’t consumating a marriage.
Incidentally, the Church does not consider the children of such a union illegitimate so long as both parents thought at the time that the marriage was valid, so whatever else I may be, I’m not a bastard.