Exit strategy

DIVORCE is a fire exit, the Turkish playwright Mehmet Murat ildan writes. “When a house is burning, it doesn’t matter who set the fire. If there is no fire exit, everyone in the house will be burned!” By this analogy, Filipino families have been living dangerously indeed, starting with more than three centuries of a Spanish Catholic theocracy that prohibited absolute divorce. Things were no better in the decades that followed, where the only relief from a ruinous marriage was legal separation — also called a relative divorce — that merely allowed them to live separately.

The Family Code of the Philippines that came into effect in 1988 allowed a marriage to be annulled, but the process is tedious, lengthy and expensive.

In 2018, the House of Representatives approved on third and final reading a bonafide divorce bill, but the effort failed because a counterpart measure in the Senate languished at the committee level.

Opposition from the Catholic Church and other Christian groups — and their hold over some politicians — have been one of the biggest obstacles to the passage of a divorce bill. A prime example of this is Senate Majority Leader Emmanuel Joel Villanueva, the son of a populist Christian evangelist, who famously said: “Divorce? Over my dead body.”

Facing this kind of resistance, two divorce bills are making their way through the legislative mill again. In the lower chamber, House Bill 9349, or the “Absolute Divorce Act,” is scheduled for plenary debates almost a year after the measure was approved at the committee level.

“An absolute divorce law is urgently necessary for marriages which have collapsed and are beyond repair, where the majority of the victims are the wives who have been subjected to cruelty, violence, infidelity and abandonment,” Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman said during his sponsorship speech last month.

Sen. Ana Theresia “Risa” Hontiveros, author of Senate Bill 2443, or the “Dissolution of Marriage Act,” is still waiting for her colleagues to give the measure “a fair hearing” in plenary debates, which have not been scheduled months after it was passed at the committee level last September.

If the plenary debates actually begin, we expect conservative lawmakers to raise the same tired objections.

One argument goes like this: “Divorce is unconstitutional because the Constitution mandates the state to uphold the sanctity of marriage.” But the Constitution also says the prime duty of government is to serve and protect the people, including wives who are beaten by abusive husbands in sham marriages that no amount of proselytizing can sanctify.

On the other hand, making divorce unavailable could be seen as a violation of the constitutional principle of equal protection under the law. Under the 1977 Code of Muslim Personal Laws, Muslims — unlike the majority of Filipinos — are already allowed to divorce.

Those opposed to divorce also argue there is already a remedy, which is a church or civil annulment. But to have a marriage annulled by a church tribunal or a civil judge, the parties must show it was defective from the beginning: that one or both were too young to get married; that proper parental consent was not obtained; that one of the parties was already married or had an incurable sexually transmissible disease; or — most commonly — that the spouses were “psychologically incapacitated” at the time of the marriage.

The process is not only slow and psychologically painful but also expensive. It can take years — and a substantial amount of money — to finalize a civil annulment, rendering this option practically unavailable to the poor.

Those who oppose a divorce law also say it would create a flood of divorce cases that would threaten the foundations of society, but the recent experience of another highly Catholic country, Malta, says otherwise.

Ten years after it became the last European country to pass a divorce law, Malta had the lowest divorce rate of 0.7 divorces per 1,000 persons in the European Union, statistics published by Eurostat in 2020 show.

Addressing the same concern, Lagman emphasized that absolute divorce is not for everybody. “The overwhelming majority of Filipino marriages are happy, enduring and loving. They do not need the divorce law,” he said.

It should not be a source of pride to be the only nation on Earth to have no divorce law. It is a cause for shame — shame at our backwardness and our lack of maturity as a society to deal with the most basic realities of life.

“In the grant of absolute divorce, no marriage is destroyed because the union has long perished,” Lagman said. To this, we add that the parties to that irreparably damaged marriage need not be destroyed along with it — so long as they can find the all-important exit.