Senator Risa Hontiveros is pushing for a lot of laws including the SOGIE bill. She's also pushing for the legalization of divorce in our country. The Philippines is actually among the last few countries that don't allow divorce. One of the other countries is the Vatican.
What we currently have in it's place is legal annulment and legal separation. Before we discuss these things, it might be best to define these terms:
Legal Annulment = the marriage never happened (i.e., there was an impediment to marriage at the time of the wedding). Things such the couple are actually related, either spouse was forced into marriage, the marriage was never consummated and cannot be consummated, mental illness at the time of the wedding, and in cases where the couple got married while they were minors, the parents did not consent would be grounds for annulment. Annulment looks at the validity of the marriage itself. As such, physical abuse and infidelity are not grounds for annulment.
Legal Separation = the couple is still married but for specific reasons, one of the spouses can request that both of them be legally separated. Reasons like a violent spouse or infidelity are among the reasons that legal separation is given. Legally separated couples are not allowed to marry other people. If they somehow do get married and the spouse is still alive, this can be ground for an annulment.
Legal Divorce = both parties agree that the marriage happened (is valid) but one or both parties want to end the marriage. It's exactly like legal separation except that afterwards, the spouses are no longer considered married to each other.Now, that that's out of the way, the only reason for legalizing divorce is to allow both parties to be free to marry other people as that's the only difference between the proposed legal divorce and legal separation.
As with almost anything that Risa Hontiveros files in the Senate, religious groups flock to oppose this move. Senator Hontiveros makes a good point when she says that divorce isn't something that is forced on people so if it opposes your faith, then don't do it. It should be so simple. But I'm still against this move by the good senator.
My reason for opposing the legalization of divorce is simple - it seeks to redefine marriage. Good marriages are the foundations of good families. Good families are the foundations of good societies. And good societies are the foundations for a great nation. In other words, we have to get marriage right if we're ever to grow as a nation.
So what is marriage? I want to take my time with this and go the opposite route. I'd start with what marriage is NOT.
Let's start from the one thing (probably the only thing) that everyone agrees on. Can family members (like siblings, parent/child, cousins) get married? To this people will rightly say "No." That's because marriage, while it rightly involves love, it refers to a romantic type of love - the type where both parties engage in sexual intercourse. The reason we exclude family members from marrying each other is that the offspring will have a tendency to have abnormalities and be generally weaker.
In other words, we cannot separate the idea of children from marriage. Even proponents for same sex marriage will agree that incest is a line they aren't willing to cross - even if it involves two sisters, for example. We, as humans, know that romantic love is NOT the sole basis of marriage as our minds directly go to the children of that marriage.
From this line of reasoning, we should then exclude everyone whose relationship is incapable of bearing children - same sex couples, incestuous relationships, etc. This means anyone can marry any one else of the opposite sex as long as they're not related.
Where does divorce enter the picture? We then have to define how long a marriage is to last. Practically everyone will agree that marriage isn't something people can go into willy nilly. There exists a heaviness with getting married to someone that doesn't exist with going into a relationship or a friendship with someone. If I were to pose that marriage can exist between a couple but only for a year then it's renewable after a year if both parties still consent, we'd find that rather odd.
As I've explained in my previous point where children are a part of the marriage equation, they should be considered again in this scenario. The reason we do not allow marriages to be valid for a fixed amount of time is the protection of the children. The model of a father and a mother in the household is still the best model for a family - almost as if we were made for it but I digress.
In the same vein, we find it equally odd that a marriage would be valid only for an arbitrary period of time or "when one party doesn't want to stay married." Put simply, divorce actually goes against what marriage is and is in effect, trying to redefine it.
Right now, we already have legal annulment and legal separation. The push for divorce is a move to redefine marriage for the sole purpose of appeasing the tiny few who wish to remarry after being separated. Think about it clearly and that's exactly what this is.
And as I've said before, if we allow marriage to be redefined this one time, it will allow for so many other strange combinations in the future like a trio being married, or a child marrying their parent or an old person. People will say this is a slippery slope and I get that. But what isn't a slippery slope is to expect another redefinition of marriage if we allow it one time. I assure that.
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