UNTIL the day former Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez slipped out of power in the House, his divorce bill (HB 7303), which had easily passed the House on third reading, was awaiting similar action in the Senate, to be known as the “Absolute Divorce Act of 2018.”
Alvarez was bullish about the bill on the pretext that as per Social Weather Stations’ (SWS) survey, “53 percent or majority of Filipinos support the enactment of a divorce law.” No other divorce bill had cleared the committee level and the plenary before.
But now the bill seems doomed in the Senate, what with both the Church and ironically President Duterte – whose 27-year marriage to Elizabeth Zimmerman ended in annulment in the year 2000 – opposing it.
How then could SWS still prove its survey accurate when re-electionist senators are against it for fear of losing in the forthcoming mid-term election? If it were a popular advocacy, they would go for it even if it contravenes their personal viewpoint.
As for me, with or without a divorce law, I am happily separated from my wife on the ground of incompatibility.
Divorce is actually tolerated by some Christian sects because of one Biblical ground – unfaithfulness. The verse in Matthew 5:32 clearly states that “a man who divorces his wife, unless she has been unfaithful, causes her to commit adultery. And anyone who marries a divorced woman also commits adultery.”
It would be presumptuous for a hopeless union to continue just because of a seemingly contradictory Bible verse: “What God has joined, man must not separate” (Matthew 19:6). On second thought, that would be attributing to God the bad marriage in the first place.
The first divorce bill I read about was that authored by the late Assemblyman Arturo Pacificador in the early 1980s, proposing three grounds for divorce: adultery on the part of the wife and concubinage on the husband’s (yes, the aforesaid Biblical ground); attempt by the respondent against the life of the petitioner; and abandonment of the petitioner by the respondent without just cause for at least five consecutive years.
“Times have so changed,” said Pacificador in his explanatory note to the bill, “that even the predominantly Catholic Italy and Brazil have passed their own divorce laws.”
Pacificador’s grounds, except for the last-mentioned, are in fact among the existing grounds for legal separation which entitles spouses to live separately without dissolving matrimony.
Surprisingly, Pacificador missed to cite one of the Catholic Church’s grounds for annulment – inability of the respondent to perform sexual act.
The National Council of Churches in the Philippines (NCCP) favored divorce as proposed by the Pacificador bill, but only “as a last resort should everything else fails and the dissolution of the marriage ties appears to the couple as the only possible way of redeeming themselves and their children.”
Pacificador’s bill might have passed if not for then First Lady Imelda Marcos, whom the subservient Batasang Pambansa could not refuse. She opposed it because “it could weaken the family and demoralize the children.”
From whatever angle we look, the absence of a divorce law drives the problem of broken home from worse to worst. Everybody knows that, without legal remedy, estranged couples are forced to either live in with a new partner or indulge in short-time affairs. On the other hand, the couples who choose to remain under one roof due to religious bigotry are already condemned to hell on earth.
Bless the others who think for themselves. They would rather live outside, than inside, a broken home. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
….and yeah, I would rather live outside than inside a broken home. I have lived in a broken family, – and a family of my own… been used to be broken. I wanna be free too.
Many Filipinos are eagerly waiting for the implementation of the divorce bill -including I.
I am sure, we all want to know the answer of the question: “Kailan po ba maipapatupad ang divorce bill?”