Did you know that being married and having children disqualifies you from the Miss Universe pageant? Veronika Didusenko did, and she entered anyway and was actually crowned Miss Ukraine, but was then stripped of her title and disqualified from competing to be Miss Universe when organizers found out she was a wife and mother.
If that sounds fucked up to you, it’s because that’s fucked up. So she’s suing the pageant for discrimination, as reported by CNN.
“The Equality Act (2010) protects against discrimination on the basis of certain protected characteristics, including marriage, maternity and sex,” British human rights lawyer Ravi Naik, who is representing Didusenko, said in a I statement.“The reason Veronika was not allowed to compete in Miss World is because she was married and had a child. Quite simply, denying her the chance of competing on those bases would seem to breach those protections against discrimination.”
It’s hard to argue it isn’t discriminatory, especially with the weak-ass excuses the pageant officials gave last year when the disqualification happened.
CNN was unable to immediately reach Miss World for further comment, but Miss World chairman Julia Morley attributed the rules to cultural sensitivity on Good Morning Britain in December 2018.“When you’re trying to get a worldwide organization to agree, you have to look to everyone, and they vote as to what is acceptable,” Morley said.“Whatever I feel, or whatever Europe feels, is one thing. What the rest of the world may feel, when they’ve got to look at their various religions, various things, if you can understand that we don’t just have our own feelings, we have to consider others.”