The Gavel in the Bedroom

Emmanuel Caliwan, J.D.

The Gavel in the Bedroom

Emmanuel Caliwan, J.D.

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The gavel in the bedroom By Fr. Ranhilio Aquino | May. 26, 2014 at 12:01am 7 The Supreme Court, in probably the first case of its kind, upheld the conviction of a husband who, according to the Information filed against him, had forced himself on his wife. The fact that a woman is one’s wife does not give one the right, the Court taught, to violate her on a whim or whenever one wishes too, regardless of her own disposition. Hailed, as quite expected, by women’s groups as a triumph for the cause of feminine equality even—perhaps, especially—in conjugal relations, the High Court’s judgement does raise interesting, even disturbing questions. The gavel has found its way into the bedroom! Older manuals of moral theology referred to a “debitum” (an obligation) that spouses owed each other because of the marriage covenant by which each spouse gave the other his or her body. A spouse could not, except for the most serious of reasons, refuse the other in bed. In fairness to the moral theologians of the past, both spouses were burdened by this obligation —and so it was an inclusive precept —and when one had a spouse who was particularly upbeat in respect to bedroom calisthenics, this really could be a burden! Today, of course, there is hardly any mention of this in courses of ethics or even of moral theology. For one thing it is neither easy nor desirable to lay down precepts for intimacies between spouses especially when the authorities who discourse on right and wrong in conjugal activity have sworn to shun its pleasures. Even chapters on marital continence by which theologians sought to distinguish between the human and the sub-human in marital acts are, thankfully, a thing of the past. Ironically, many of the manuals of the past, some remark, read like books of pornography because of the detail into which they often delved. There are matters best left to the careful calibration of the spouses themselves that take a whole lot of complex facts into consideration including the dynamic of the relation and understanding between spouses. It is part of a process by which personalities are enriched that spouses adjust to each other: “read” each other’s needs and respect each other’s dispositions. Responding to another is supremely educational as it broadens the horizon of one to include that of the other, drawing him away from the self-centeredness by which we usually regulate our lives to the responsibility that makes the discomfort and the illness of the other my responsibility as well! 1 There is a limit to what we can juridify! I am not saying that the Supreme Court should have not have rendered the judgment that it did. There are circumstances that justify the law’s intervention, as when a wife is brutalized by a sexually revved up and enraged husband. But if we argue against the criminalization of libel because of the supposed “chilling effect” it may have on the twin freedoms of expression and of the press, should we not worry about the chill that the hospitality of the court to suits arising from the bedroom coordination of husband and wife leaves in its trail? No, a man is not entitled to have his way with his wife whenever he wants to, in any way he wants to. But neither should judges be called in too often to referee between the spouses in bed! I am also afraid that when a wife keeps a calendar that closely follows the church’s ranking of days and excludes sex on Sundays, solemnities feasts and compulsory memorials — demanding that her husband rein himself in until the next free day, the “kasambahays”, “labanderas” or even “kapitbahays” may appear to him more alluring and less fastidious. And if it is the husband who refuses the importuning of the wife and she in turn “punishes” him by compelling him to share bed space in the dog kennel, or refusing to talk to him, filling each waking moment in the house with tension and causing it to resemble a Carthusian monastery by its eerie silence, what charges should be filed against the wife? None? But that would be unequal protection of the laws, for who is to say that the cruelties visited by a spurned wife on an abstemious husband are any less injurious to his equanimity and psychological well-being? One particular scene from the TV series—the Tudors—made me really laugh. When the aged Portuguese king bedded his bride, an English princess— a Tudor—for the first time, priests and bishops surrounded the bed, sprinkled the couple with Holy Water and swung censers over them to guarantee a fruitful union. I am not comfortable at the prospect of having a robed figure, gavel in hand ruling on what happens under the sheets in place of the priests and bishops with their aspergils and censers. “Extra omnes”....all out.....that is how non-Cardinals are driven out of the conclave hall. That is what spouses should say as well of intruders into the bedroom and even under the covers! 2

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The Gavel in the Bedroom

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