Duterte and Team Honeylet

No one reacted to Cielito “Honeylet” Avanceña posing in photos with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, his wife Akie and President Duterte last Jan. 13. This nonresponse is more meaningful than Abe’s 1-trillion-yen aid package or his being shown the President’s mosquito net.

After Mr. Duterte won, Filipinos asked who would be the First Lady. During the campaign, he shared that he has two wives and two girlfriends.

The first wife, he said, was sick. The second was a nurse working in the United States. He got her pregnant while traveling there as a congressman.

Mr. Duterte, however, is legally unmarried. His marriage to Elizabeth Zimmerman, who skipped cancer treatments to campaign for him, was annulled in 2000. Honeylet has lived with him for 20 years, but they are not married.

Mr. Duterte ended up sworn in flanked by his four children, including Veronica or “Kitty,” his 12-year-old daughter by Honeylet. Mr. Duterte had separate photos with his two families.

Postelection profiles of Honeylet were heartwarming. The Inquirer focused on how she shops for Mr. Duterte’s clothes. He hates itchy fabrics such as polyester, she explained, which is why he wears his barong with jeans.

She described his simple tastes, down to his preference for fried tamban fish and menudo and not much more.

Low-profile Honeylet exudes endearing simplicity. She has several small businesses in Davao City: a meat shop, a catering service and 11 Mister Donut franchises. And similar to US First Lady Melania Trump, she is staying with Kitty, who prefers to continue studying in Davao.

Despite the inauguration debate, there was no violent reaction half a year later to photos of Honeylet and Kitty at a Malacañang Christmas party, or celebrating a simple Noche Buena at Mr. Duterte’s Davao house.

There was likewise no reaction to Honeylet joining the state banquet for Abe or the intimate breakfast with him at Mr. Duterte’s house, not even from protocol-bound Japan.

Honeylet escorted Akie Abe to a Davao Japanese cemetery. No one recalled earlier plans for Mr. Duterte’s daughter Sara to act as first lady. Honeylet seems to have done at least as well as Sydney Ellen Wade did in “The American President” when faced with a fictional French president.

The Inquirer refers to Honeylet as Mr. Duterte’s “partner,” as do the Philippine Star, the Manila Standard and the Washington Post. ABS-CBN News, GMA News and Rappler matter-of-factly use “common-law wife.”

One Standard and one Singapore Straits Times article even referred to Honeylet as Mr. Duterte’s wife or spouse.

Honeylet was cited as “mistress” in a newspaper only once in the past months. Giving well-meaning pre-inaugural advice, Standard columnist Emil Jurado wrote: “President Duterte should just marry Honeylet and avoid all snide remarks against the president living in Malacañang with a mistress.”

No one even remembers this months later.

The photo of Honeylet smiling with the Abes is an important barometer for today’s social issues.

Mr. Duterte passed an executive order to implement the Reproductive Health Act in contrast to a Supreme Court restraining order on certain contraceptives. Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, a key Duterte ally, promised to file a same-sex marriage bill, and TV host Tim Yap just proposed to his boyfriend. Finally, the Philippines remains the only country other than the Vatican prohibiting divorce.

The human rights law on relationships is unsurprisingly simple. The US Supreme Court ended its 2015 Obergefell decision: “No union is more profound than marriage… (These couples’) plea is that they do respect (marriage), respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves…. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

Filipinos have an admirable capacity for embracing people as they are. If Team Honeylet accepts the woman their President loves as good enough to present to the world, laws and labels be damned, perhaps Filipinos of all other stripes of relationships and identities should as well.

React: [email protected], Twitter @oscarfbtan, facebook.com/OscarFranklinTan.