‘Couples in broken, void marriages qualify for divorce’

While it is the state’s duty to preserve the sanctity of marriage, saving battered wives and their children is an equally important mandate of the government, one of proponents of the absolute divorce bill said yesterday. Rep. Edcel Lagman, one of the main authors of the four consolidated bills that will undergo plenary debates in the House of Representatives, said the state is “also duty-bound to provide full relief to spouses and their children in irremediably broken and lost marriages.”

“When a marriage totally breaks down and reconciliation is nil, it is also the duty of the state to afford relief to the spouses in irreconcilable conflict relations and bail them and their children out from the tempest of incessant discord,” the lawmaker from Albay said.

He said “absolute divorce must be a right or option of concerned spouses even as they still have the choice to secure annulment of marriage, legal separation or nullification of marriage under the provisions of the Family Code, which are not repealed.”

Lagman, along with fellow authors Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, House Deputy Speaker Pia Cayetano, Reps. Robert Ace Barbers and Rodel Batocabe and women’s group Gabriela, gave assurances that only those whose marriages are beyond salvation will be eligible for divorce.

“Only spouses in totally broken marriages and those void from the start are entitled to a grant of absolute divorce. In absolute divorce proceedings, there is no more marriage to protect or destroy because it has disintegrated much earlier,” Lagman pointed out.

As far as the absolute divorce and dissolution of marriage bill authors are concerned, the measure “provides a decent and merciful interment for an irremediably dead marriage even as the state protects and preserves vibrant and happy marital relationships.”

“While the state continues to protect and preserve marriage as a social institution and as the foundation of the family, shattered marriages beyond rehabilitation happen due to human frailties and limitations,” Lagman said.

“The state cannot abandon couples and their children in a house on fire,” he explained, rather figuratively.

“Love, trust and respect, which are the veritable foundations of marriage and family, are voluntary, mutual and earned, and when they are lost, no amount of compulsion by custom or religion can restore their value,” Lagman maintained.