Many of our elected officials say they are against legalizing divorce for accordingly, it destroys the family as an inviolable social institution. Politicians, clever as they are, would prefer to first seek the sentiment of the people before expressing their view to safeguard their chances of getting the support of the electorate. In the end, the fate of every family in this country is decided by the dictates of the self-anointed guardians of our morality that any step to break asunder the family is immoral and equivocally illegal.
However, if one has to view marriage outside the portals of what is moral, our interdiction of divorce has only prevented married couples from seeking a renewal of their lives but encouraged the commission of immoral acts. Let us not talk about the legal consequence of one who violates what morality proscribes, but of the emotion and physical effects that dissipate the parties living under one roof but no longer have any affection at each other or worse, has turned their love to hatred that verbal and physical abuse now characterizes their relationship.
Despite all exhortation or should we say, the scaffoldings built by our spiritual mentors to prevent the passage of a divorce law, the separation among married couples continues to proliferate but nobody wants to talk about it because that topic has become taboo. We always try to gloss over that reality because our moral beliefs forbid that. So we take for granted a philandering wealthy husband maintaining a paramour and even an informal harem, yet easily condemn a married woman for committing adultery without examining what drove her to it.
Because of these artificialities in our moral values, we have been forced to carry on the old feudalistic system of classifying siblings as legitimate, illegitimate, acknowledged natural children, etc. and they have implication on how much each of these mortals will inherit from the wrongdoings of their parents. Maybe inheritance has somewhat been liberalized by the Family Code, but it does not alter the overall structure of the laws of succession because the absence of a divorce law in this country remains feudalistic.
It is the absence of a divorce law that prevents the splitting up of property ownership and the reason why our so-called democratic institution has failed us. Wealthy families would rather pretend to keep their family relationship intact despite the fact that either or both are wallowing in immorality necessarily just to maintain their political dynasty. The division of property is the last vein of feudalism that divorce seeks to cut in this clerico-dominated society of ours, and alimony is a punishment for the guilty party.
Rather, our church leaders today turned a blind eye to the reality that many of our people simply separate if they could cope up with the vicissitudes of economic life. We avoid confronting the issue that among poor families, broken marriage is often the result of financial difficulties and the problem begins on how to sustain the basic needs of the family. To many young couples, legal separation is costly and could not offer them the right solution to their problem.
To others, the idea of divorce is not a solution to the problem. But to keep the marriage ties is to unjustly punish them. It will likely open the door to the commission of infidelity. Thus, in our obstinate position to preserve the sanctity of the family, we introduced novel ways to get away with divorce. While maintaining a mistress is both immoral and prohibited, the practice is often tacitly tolerated if the aggrieved party does not have the resources to pursue a case for legal separation or annulment of marriage.
This explains why in this country we see and hear one says “this man has a mistress or that woman is a mistress” because we have not devised a legal method to solve marital problem requiring divorce. Divorce may be drastic but it is the only way to erase the problem of maintaining a mistress.
More than anything else, people are asking why the Church and other religious organizations vehemently oppose divorce but have in fact been granting divorce to people given the brand name of “church annulment of marriage.” Legal pundits have been debating on how to differentiate annulment of marriage from divorce. In legal separation, they say, the couple is allowed to live separately from bed and board but their marriage subsists. Invariably, they cannot remarry or maintain another partner other than their husband or wife which is absurd. Annulment of marriage is a process by which the legal fiction of marriage is interpreted as if it never took place. As explained, an annulment is possible when the Family Code of the Philippines considers it to have been void because of the absence of essential and formal requisites necessary for a marriage to have validity. The elements entail legal capacity such as age of the spouse, gender requirements and when the relationship is against public policy which may involve incestuous situations or when one of the parties has already married another individual. Mental incapacity or deficiencies could cause a void marriage, and similar circumstances may lead to the same end.
On the other hand, nullity of marriage is when a marriage is voidable but valid until the marriage is annulled. However, the relationship is not severed until adjudged by the courts. An example is when the contract for marriage was initiated through consent that was forced. Another is when intimidation or undue influence on one party has been achieved or if the spouse was of unsound mind when entering into the marriage contract. However, unlike an annulment, a nullity of marriage is still a registered and recorded marriage for both parties even after the process has been completed.
But taken as a whole, the present remedy offered by law and of the Church is by far costly and imposes so many conditions only for them to get what others say as partial divorce which is logically wrong. In fact, some cases on annulment of marriage and legal separation have been the source of corruption which reason why many judges have been dismissed from the service because of anomalies involved in said cases. Only those who could afford to hire a lawyer and bear the cost of litigation can pursue their case while those who cannot simply tend to forget all about it.
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