🇵🇭 Divorce bill enters final stretch in dramatic Senate

Hello friends!

How silly of me to think the Australian government would’ve done more to improve connectivity in country NSW and Victoria in the decade since I last did the Canberra-Melbourne trip regularly! There went the plan to work all morning and read all afternoon. Instead, I read all morning and watched the fantastic Errol Flynn documentary about John Le Carre all afternoon.

Beyond thinking about quitting this newsletter and becoming the world’s most beloved spy novelist for my generation, I was left stunned by a brief moment. Le Carre (feels wrong to use the government name, no?) had an incredible aside that, I think, deserves a documentary of his own. His father in the mid-60s, he tells Flynn, got locked up in Jakarta for reasons that still remain unclear and he sent a bunch of cash via the British embassy to get him out. 

Jakarta for a foreign man — any man! — is a hot place in the mid-60s, of course, and Le Carre suggested it may have had something to do with arms running. And that was it! A maybe-30-second moment.

Anyway, we have a major update in a long-running story in the Philippines today so I’m testing out the paywall feature here on Beehiiv. I want as many people as possible to know about the divorce bill so here’s hoping it works!

Erin Cook

A win for divorce in the Philippines

A remarkable hurdle passed in the Philippines where the long-fought-for divorce bill has passed its final reading in the House. The voter breakdown shows how contentious the issue remains: 126 lawmakers for, 109 against and 20 abstentions, the Inquirer reported Wednesday. It now goes over to the Senate. 

It’s not the no-fault divorce we see elsewhere in the world but the Inquirer link above shows us the long, though likely not exhaustive, list of reasons one could give. Still, the Philippines has infamously remained one of two countries in which divorce remains illegal — the other is the Vatican. And this is an enormous win for advocates who have fought tirelessly for decades. 

We’ve been here before. The House passed the bill back in 2018 before it died in the Senate but, Congressman Edcel Lagman and author of the bill Edcel Lagman says, a different, less conservative Senate (more on that mayhem below) this time around gives him cause for hope. 

“Hopefully, it will move faster and moreso, that the majority leader has been quoted as he is in favour of the divorce bill. Unlike his predecessor, who was against the bill, together with the bill on the prevention of adolescent pregnancy, so the change in leadership is favourable to the divorce bill,” he told Rappler. 

I’m also really impressed with Lagman’s comments rejecting the notion that the Philippines shouldn’t have divorce as Catholicism is the dominant religion: “We do not vote against a measure because of fear, we should legislate based on courage and empirical issues.” 

Well done, I’m cheering you on! 

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