The picture in the Inquirer (Across the Nation, 4/27/13) showing Team PNoy senatorial candidate Sonny Angara bowing and kissing the hand of Catholic Archbishop Paciano Aniceto, while pledging not to support a divorce bill in Congress, shows why the Philippines is among the social and economic laggards in Asia and the world.
Congress is to be commended for passing some very important bills despite strong opposition to them, but bills with flaws that must have been obvious during the debates.
My last piece, “The popularity of legalizing divorce,” (Inquirer, 12/22/2012) showed that national sentiments on allowing legal divorce and remarriage for spouses already separated and irreconcilable had shifted from an even division in 2005 to favoring it in 2011 by a score of 50-33. It was not about facilitating escapes of those with troubled but nominally intact marriages, but about giving another chance for those with marriages already broken.
In my view, what the narrow 113-104-3 second-reading vote for the reproductive health bill in the House reflected was the initial division of the legislators, and not the general division of the Filipino people.
The story is told about a wife who frantically called her husband: “Joe, come home quickly. I don’t know what to do! Your children and my children are fighting our children!”
“He looks like (a) severe Renaissance pope: tall, elegant and bony, with grey hair combed smoothly back, a beak of a nose and piercing blue eyes,” the Economist wrote in April 1998. “(Carlo Maria Martini) might have stepped out of a canvas by Raphael. But looks can mislead.”
Complications arising from the absence of a divorce law in the Philippines (we are the lone holdout in the world) have shown themselves in two instances involving prominent personalities.
Divorce talk sucks. Everything about it smacks of failure. The door to hell on earth opens wide. Destroyed families, traumatized children, defaulted commitment, devastated parents and relatives. Sociologically, divorce weakens society’s moral fibers. Psychologically divorce promotes skepticism among the youth. The jargons of divorce mean self-destruction. Psychological incapacity is the euphemism for total disaster. It [...]
In her June 5 column, Rina Jimenez-David talks about divorce. She touches on the “Malta case,” where a majority of the 98-percent Catholic population voted for divorce. Now comes our Pinoy gaya-gaya bandwagon mentality. David asks, “If Malta can fall in step with the rest of the world, why can’t the Philippines? And what is [...]
Divorce is a current buzzword in the public discourse. However, before discussing the termination of a valid marriage (to be distinguished from declaring the nullity or annulment of an invalid union), let me first write about its beginning. When a groom and a bride exchange “I do’s,” the law instantly takes over their personal and [...]
A lawyer-friend once remarked that divorce in the Philippines is a matter of great concern only to the middle class, since it hardly matters to the very rich and to the very poor. Rich couples who want to bring an end to their marital union could very well split up and leave the dirty details [...]
Next to the unhappy wives of the Republic of Malta, population 410,000, only one other country can claim to be affected by the results of last month’s non-binding referendum on divorce. Malta’s contentious approval of the legalization of divorce leaves Catholic Philippines the only nation in the world without the right to freely divorce – [...]
