Now is the time for a divorce law

By Herbert Vego

IN a press briefing, Palace Press Officer Claire Castro said that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. may favor divorce bill “if its provisions are sound.”

She recalled that in 2022, then-presidential aspirant Marcos had expressed openness to legalizing divorce.

The Philippines and the Vatican City are the only two countries with no divorce law, although our Muslim minority can divorce under Sharia law, and a legal process exists for Filipinos to have a foreign divorce recognized.

It is therefore not surprising that early in his term in July 2022, Sen. Robin Padilla, a Muslim, filed a bill to legalize divorce in the Philippines “to provide legal recourse for couples with irreconcilable differences.”

In the same year, Senators Risa Hontiveros and Raffy Tulfo filed their own versions of the “Absolute Divorce Act”.

None of their bills passed into law. But they are not giving up refiling their bills now in the 20^th Congress. At the moment, 11 senators have expressed support for such a law to be passed, namely Risa Hontiveros, Robinhood Padilla, Raffy Tulfo, Loren Legarda, Ronald dela Rosa, JV Ejercito, Win Gatchalian, Lito Lapid, Imee Marcos, Pia Cayetano and Mark Villar.

The objection by the Roman Catholic Church has always been cited as the major stumbling block to legalization of divorce.

One recalls that in 2018 or one year before the end of the 17th Congress,  the late Rep.Edcel Lagman (Albay) filed a divorce bill (House Bill 7303) which breezed through the House of Representatives with a total of 134 House members who approved it against 57 who opposed and only two who abstained.

Unfortunately, the Senate failed to pass its own, obviously because then President Rodrigo Duterte — despite his annulled marriage to Elizabeth Zimmerman – took the opposite stand.

My belief is that, divorced or not, any citizen could “happily separate” from a spouse on mere incompatibility. But how about those who want to remarry?

Christian sects that allow divorce cite one Biblical ground – unfaithfulness. 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 because of a seemingly contradictory Bible verse: “What God has joined, man must not separate” (Matthew 19:6).

On second thought, why hold God responsible for joining mismatches?

The first Philippine divorce,  if I am not mistaken, was authored by the late Assemblyman Arturo Pacificador in the early 1980s on three grounds: adultery on the part of the wife and concubinage on the husband’s; an attempt by the respondent against the life of the petitioner; and abandonment of the petitioner by the respondent without just cause.

Pacificador’s first two aforesaid grounds are in fact among the existing grounds for legal separation which entitles spouses to live separately without dissolving matrimony.

Pacificador’s bill might have passed had then First Lady Imelda Marcos not intervened. As a result, the subservient Batasang Pambansa echoed her opinion that “it could weaken the family and demoralize the children.”

While the Catholic Church prohibits divorce, it allows annulment of marriage in the Philippines, which requires proving that a valid sacramental marriage never existed from the start. One of its grounds for annulment is the inability of the respondent to perform the sexual act.

The National Council of Churches in the Philippines (NCCP) – an organization of 10 non-Roman Catholic Christian sects — favors divorce, but only “as last resort if 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.”

It is a fact that without legal remedy, estranged couples are forced to either live in with a new partner or indulge in short-time affairs.

Methinks that the couples who choose to remain under one roof due to religious bigotry are already condemned to hell on earth.

-oOo-

POOR ‘ALPOTERA’

IF you have been listening to a US-based vlogger working for Vice President Sara Duterte, you must have noticed that she has one name for women who claim to be pro-Sara but never say a word against BBM. She calls them “Alpotera”.

Both the vlogger and an Ilongga “Alpotera” used to work together for the BBM-Sara “uniteam” that has crumbled.

Our source said that this “Alpotera” from Bacolod City used to be protocol officer of Tatay Digong. But since she is the “sweetheart” of one of the owners of a Bacolod-based bus company, how could she take sides without offending either Inday or BBM?

The family has had family feuds that need the intervention of whoever is in power between now and 2028.