Italy Makes Lying Legal – Especially About Affairs!
Wow! This is incredible! In Italy you’ve got a license to lie and cheat in a relationship all you want! Why? Because having an extra-marital affair is wrong, and it would damage your ‘honor’, so clearly it should be lied about if you do it!
Hmmm. Let’s see… So if I murder, rape and pillage, those things must damage my honor as well. So it won’t be long before it’s legal to lie about that too! Pretty soon all of Italy will be lying their asses off – but at least they’ll all be honorable!
Licence to lie for Italian women
By Christian Fraser
BBC News, RomeItaly’s highest appeal court has ruled that married Italian women who commit adultery are entitled to lie about it to protect their honour.
The court gave its landmark ruling after hearing the case of a 48-year-old woman, convicted of giving false testimony to police by denying she had lent her mobile phone to her lover. The appeal court did not agree that she had broken the law. It said bending the truth was justified to conceal extra-marital relationships.
In a predominantly Catholic country you might expect the courts to take a dim view of lying and adultery. But not in this case. The woman who brought the appeal was from Porto Ercole on the Tuscany coast, and named only as Carla. She had lent her telephone to her secret lover, Giovanni, who then used it to call Carla’s estranged husband, Vincenzo, and insult him.
Giovanni, the lover, was convicted of abusive behaviour in a local court, and Carla convicted as an accessory.
But the Court of Cassation found that having a lover was a circumstance that damaged the honour of the person among family and friends. Lying about it, therefore, was permitted, even in a judicial investigation. It is not yet clear whether the ruling might also apply to men who have secret mistresses.
The Court of Cassation, which is largely staffed by elderly male appeal judges, has in the past issued a number of controversial judgements. It once gave a ruling, later rescinded after protests from women’s groups, that a woman could not be raped by definition if she was wearing tight jeans, since the jeans could only be removed with her consent.
One email per post. Twenty years of this, still going. Unsubscribe whenever.
Anytime lying leads to something like this:
http://www.askugg.com/2007/04/05/i-lied-to-and-cheated-on-my-husband-for-14-years-so-he-could-provide-for-me-5-of-our-7-children-were-not-his-and-now-im-leaving-him-for-the-other-man/
I take issue =/
So in this case, I take issue. Why is there a need to defend honor you gave up for infidelity?
That is ridiculous. I just don’t understand the judicial system sometimes. It seems like they get so caught up around themselves that they end up making the wrong judgment. It doesn’t help when there’s a court that has an affinity for making controversial judgments to garner attention! This goes for all countries, not just Italy.
The Philipines is a lot like that, without the subtlety of lying about it it, there is no divorce here, but couples commonly split up and “marry” again, all outside the law and church doctrine. Others have number one, two, and three girlfriends.