STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Brides in Stockholm who want their fathers to walk them down the aisle are likely to be told it can’t be done, as some pastors are refusing to allow the practice they say is sexist, a pastor said on Friday.

“In Sweden we have worked hard in many different ways to eliminate everything that is unequal,” a Lutheran Church vicar in the Stockholm region, Yvonne Hallin, told AFP.

She said she would not allow the custom in her parish, and noted that Stockholm’s bishop issued a recommendation in 2003 that pastors discourage it.

Couples who marry “are equal when it comes to finances, politics, values … but when they come to the church … the woman suddenly turns into a man’s property,” she said.

Hallin said she has informed a father who was to walk his daughter down the aisle on Saturday that he would not be doing so.

The mother of the bride, who was shocked by the news, told Swedish news agency TT that the ceremony would go ahead as planned but that the couple had had to give in to the pastor’s wishes.

“In this case it wasn’t the couple who became angry but the parents,” Hallin said, adding that most people “don’t find it strange.”

She noted that the custom of fathers walking their daughters down the aisle “is not a Swedish tradition. It has been imported from American and British films.”