Won’t, can’t marry

SOME TIME back I was talking with some friends about the Solo Parents’ Welfare Act of 2000, which extends certain benefits to both solo fathers and mothers, for example, up to seven calendar days of leave each year.

There was a palpable moment of silence from my friends and then one of them remarked, “Isn’t that rewarding immorality?”

I knew that my friend made that remark tongue in cheek, but the statement did reflect the ambivalence many Filipinos have, even the most liberal ones, over issues of family and marriage, mainly that the two have to go together. That creates all kinds of prejudices against solo parents, divorced or separated couples and, even worse, the children of such “irregular” families.

How did this anti-family bias come about in a society that claims to be Christian and pro-family?

Early Christians took on an earlier Greek Stoic tradition that saw sex as inherently evil and that the only justification for sex was reproduction. But that sex-for-reproduction had to be regulated as well, and so marriage became a mechanism to ensure sex would be reserved for that one purpose. With the fixation on marriage and sex for reproduction, marriage had to be reserved only for biological males and biological females.

As societies became more complex, these rigid ideas about marriage became problematic because all kinds of legal rights and responsibilities were now being defined within the framework of marriage, together with strict definitions on the roles of husbands and wives. Until fairly recently, Filipino wives needed the permission of their husband to legally borrow money from the bank, or buy property, or even get contraceptives. These unfair restrictions have been removed, but in practice many wives will still have problems because a bank manager, or a real estate agent, or a nurse in a rural health unit might deny certain rights because they retain the idea of marriage as a divinely-decreed relationship between a husband and a subservient wife.

The Solo Parents’ Welfare Act gives many different categories of solo parents (including, for example, couples where one spouse abandons the other, or where one spouse is in prison) but I want to focus on the unmarried ones.

When that law was first proposed, it met with strong opposition. Former Sen. Francisco Tatad said the law would transform the state into a “surrogate husband.” Although he later voted in favor of the law, his comment reflects the moralistic biases against solo parents, particularly women.

People’s biases against single mothers are not so much about having gotten pregnant outside of marriage than not having married the “inseminator” (I’m borrowing a term being used to describe Arnold Schwarzenegger). Our narrow moralism prevents us from recognizing that the inseminator may have disappeared, or may be unwilling to take on new responsibilities as a father, much less a husband. Or, that the woman might have made a wise decision not marrying the man who got her pregnant, knowing he was not prepared to be a husband or father.

Marriage is not necessarily pro-family. Although I say solo mothers may face greater challenges raising their children alone, I also see many wives who complain that they might as well have remained single since their husbands are always “missing in action.”

The irony is that you may have unmarried people who have been together for years, totally committed to each other and to their children (some biological offspring, others adoptive) but who do not have many basic rights reserved for married couples. I realized this a few years ago when I had to rush a friend to the hospital for an emergency. The attending doctor gave me a waiver form which would authorize the hospital to initiate whatever medical procedures that were needed. When she asked how I was related to the patient, I answered “a friend” and she said I would have to get the patient’s relatives, preferably the spouse or parents, to sign.

My friend didn’t have a wife. As for his parents, I called them and they begged off from going to the hospital because they wanted to catch a Manny Pacquiao fight. Fortunately, the doctor was very understanding and admitted my friend with my promise to get the required signatures, which I did the next day, driving all the way to Laguna and back.

I know some readers are thinking of sending me fan mail arguing that marriage is, literally, made in heaven, reserved only for men and women, and so it can’t be dissolved, ad nauseam. It’s their right to waste their time. My position is that marriage is a human institution. Sometimes the laws around marriage stagnate and become dysfunctional, overwhelmed by traditional prejudices. More often it evolves because people will fight tooth and nail to change the laws because they want to better protect their loved ones and because the laws have become anti-family and unchristian.

Coping

Change comes slowly though, and sometimes people have to be creative. I once met a South African woman who told me she and her boyfriend had been political activists fighting the apartheid regime. They had been together for years but didn’t tie the knot because they felt marriage was an irrelevant “bourgeois” institution. But after her boyfriend was arrested, she was barred from visiting him in jail because the law only allowed “spousal” visits. They got married.

They were fortunate they could marry. If one of them had been black and the other white, they would not have been allowed, at that time, to marry because of the Prohibition of Mixed Marriage Act, another one of those marriage laws instituted in the name of God and the Bible.

Today, as we see campaigns in the Philippines and other countries for same-sex marriages, people react, “But that’s immoral!” and “That will destroy the family!” But if our family laws didn’t discriminate against single parents and other “irregular” parents, couples and families, then we wouldn’t need all these skirmishes around marriage laws.

I’ll end with another case that takes us into divorce, still another one of those sacred cows protected in the name of the family.

I know a man who is absolutely devoted to his girlfriend and to the girlfriend’s son. He has taken all the responsibilities of a father, but once, when he had to rush the boy to the hospital for an emergency, he could not sign the medical forms because he was not married to the girlfriend.

Again, it was not that he and his girlfriend didn’t want to marry. They couldn’t. She had fled from her husband who was beating her, and the son, black and blue. A divorce law would have helped her, especially if she could initiate the proceedings.

Right now, her husband has vowed to block any proceedings toward even a legal separation, and threatened the wife’s boyfriend. I hope those threats remain empty because if my friend ever lands in the hospital, his girlfriend won’t be able to make important decisions in his behalf. She may be everything to him—constant companion, loyal partner, best friend, soul mate, love of his life—but she’s not his wife.

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