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Caught in the Net
Thursday, November 10, 2011
FOR those sweethearts who object to a proposal that requires them to plant at least five seedlings before they can get married, take comfort in the fact that Councilor Nida Cabrera has not put in her draft that the seedlings should first become full-grown trees before a couple can be issued a marriage license.
Take more comfort, too, that you only need to attend a lecture on solid waste management, not build a SWM system in your backyard.
Cabrera, who chairs the Cebu City Council environment committee, only wants Cebu City to be a place still livable for the future children of the couples-to-be-wed. Who would be the best custodians of the environment but the parents?
When Cabrera pitched her draft ordinance to her colleagues in August this year, she was teased. They didn’t take her proposal as seriously as she did the matters of solid waste management and ecology.
Planting seedlings as a requirement to the issuance of a marriage certificate would be less tedious and bothersome for the couples if they could plant them in pots or in their backyard.
But no, under Cabrera’s proposal, pots or backyards are not allowed. They have to plant the seedlings in an area that is designated for the tree species by the Cebu City Environment and Natural Resources Office (Cenro).
In all likelihood, Cenro will have them plant the seedlings in some mountain barangays that can be reached by habal-habal if the couple didn’t have a private vehicle. Now, now. Superstition has it that a couple about to be wed should never ride together days before their wedding lest they court an accident where one of them gets killed. For those who haven’t tried habal-habal riding in the dirt roads or narrow paths of mountains, let me tell you what it’s like: You’re attempting hara-kiri. So much for the wedding.
Cebu City Civil Registrar Evangeline Abatayo sees the impracticality of Cabrera’s proposed ordinance.
Couples who plan to get married have complained about the impending tree-planting requirement, Abatayo says.
She says Cabrera’s proposal is not helping the civil registrar’s office, which has seen a decline in the application for marriage license in the last 10 years. “The application for a marriage license is supposed to be as simple as possible,” she tells a public hearing on Cabrera’s proposed ordinance.
Complying with all the current requirements is tedious enough: they have to attend pre-marital counseling and family counseling, which are not scheduled on the same day. And if it’s a church wedding, there’s pre-Cana as well.
The husbands-to-be get a glimpse of what married life would be for them: there’s just too much talk in it. These counseling requirements give them time to think twice about getting married.
Cabrera has proposed that couples who don’t plant at least five seedlings and attend the solid waste management lecture in securing a marriage license run the risk of getting fined anywhere between P1,000 and P2,500.
The councilor is not really helping promote family life with her draft ordinance.
Anyway, a couple can get away with the tree-planting requirement: if they have lived together as husband and wife for at least five years and without any legal impediment to marry each other, they can get married without need to secure a marriage license. It says so in the Family Code of the Philippines.
Just saying.
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on November 10, 2011.
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