Equality cannot be selective

If the Philippines is serious about gender equality, it cannot continue to speak in the language of rights while legislating in the language of suspicion. A country cannot claim that women and men stand equal before the law while its criminal code still treats the same marital breach differently depending on who committed it.

The double standard is not subtle. Under Article 333 of the Revised Penal Code, adultery is framed around the married woman: one act of sex with a man who is not her husband can expose her and the man to prosecution. Under Article 334, however, a husband’s infidelity becomes concubinage only if he keeps a mistress in the conjugal home, has sex under scandalous circumstances, or cohabits elsewhere. 

The law does not merely condemn betrayal; it grades betrayal by gender. It asks far less proof when the accused is a wife and more when the accused is a husband. The Supreme Court has also noted that adultery carries heavier penalties and is easier to establish than concubinage. 

This is patriarchy with a penal clause. It reflects an old moral economy in which a woman’s sexuality is a family asset to be policed, while a man’s misconduct is tolerated unless it becomes public, scandalous, or domestically inconvenient. That is not equality. That is a legal memory of ownership.

Bigamy, under Article 349, is written in neutral terms: “any person” who contracts a second or subsequent marriage before the former marriage is legally dissolved can be punished. But bigamy cannot be discussed in isolation from the wider marriage system. 

In a country where absolute divorce remains unavailable to most citizens, and where annulment can be costly, slow, and humiliating, criminal law can become another wall around people already trapped in dead or abusive marriages. A gender-equal reform agenda should ask not only whether the wording of the statute is neutral, but whether the system gives women and men a realistic, lawful way out.

The point is not to excuse betrayal. Marriage involves duties of honesty, fidelity, and responsibility. But the criminal law is the bluntest tool of the State. It should not be used to preserve a hierarchy of shame, nor to punish women more severely for conduct that, when committed by men, is treated as a lesser and harder-to-prove offense. 

If marital infidelity is to remain punishable at all, it must be defined in gender-neutral terms, with equal elements, equal penalties, and safeguards against weaponization. A better option would be to move many consequences of infidelity into civil law: support, custody, property relations, protection orders, where the remedy is repair, not spectacle.

The Constitution promises the fundamental equality of women and men, and the Magna Carta of Women commits the State to abolish unequal structures and practices that perpetuate discrimination. Those promises cannot remain slogans for speeches every March. They must be audited against the penal code, the family code, and the daily experience of women who discover that the law still sees them through a narrower moral lens.

Congress already knows the fix. Recent proposals seek to merge adultery and concubinage into a single, gender-neutral offense of marital infidelity and to repeal the separate concubinage provision. But reform should go further: review bigamy, strengthen lawful exits from broken marriages, and align criminal statutes with constitutional equality rather than colonial-era notions of chastity.

Gender equality is not proven by rankings, campaigns, or ceremonial declarations. It is proven when the law stops telling women that their mistakes are crimes of character while men’s are matters of circumstance. If the Philippines wants its claim to equality to be believed, it must amend the laws that contradict it.