Two Women Married

From New York a German newspaper, "Aufbau," carried in

its July 28, 1961, issue this short, pertinenttarticle.

The legislators had made an oversight

-

and two women

were married! Nowhere is it written that two women may not marry each other.

Ginette and Bernadette have exchanged marriage vows in front of the mayor of St. Cloud and again before the priest of that same city in France. It was a marvelous wedding. Ginette was the husband of this couple, a tiny and dainty fellow with a glued-on mustache and huge, dark glasses. She had adopted a male identity in order to marry Bernadette.

Both women were sentenced together in a trial in Paris because they had committed eleven offenses in order to obtain the documents necessary for the marriage. Even if the law did not forbid two human beings of female sex to marry, they nevertheless forbid the embezzlement of birth certificates, the forging of documents, and general cheating of the authorities.

It all started with the embezzlement of a letter in which one Philipp Markert received a birth certificate from his hometown in Alsace. Ginette Ferroni Ginette Ferroni simply adopted the name of Philipp Markert. A certificate of baptism was obtained from the local priest under the guise that Philipp as a child had been baptized in Indochina and that documents were impossible to secure from that faraway place. Ginette, alias Philipp, had produced the marital capability certificate, without having visited a physicien. Bernadette had simply applied for the forms and had put the name of Philipp Markert on them.

Nobody discovered the truth. Bernadette's parents found their son-in-law a little strange, but he could prove he earned a good salary and Bernadette had insisted on this husband..