BY JENNIFER R. BAS AND CHRISTINE VIRTUDES
CONTRIBUTORS
THIS is because, as Jesuit-trained Bishop Emeritus Teodoro Bacani has pointed out, the country’s bishops are all united in their opposition to the RH bill. The only other time the bishops were as united was after the February 1986 snap elections when they declared that the then newly “reelected” President Ferdinand Marcos had lost any moral authority to govern. That provided the moral basis for the 1986 EDSA uprising.
PNoy may have been led to believe that he could fight our country’s most numerous church with the support of the local communists and the foreign population controllers. The global population-control operators seem determined to throw all the money needed to pass the anti-family bill.
And the “rejectionist” and “reaffirmist” blocs of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)—meaning those who reject on the one hand, and those who reaffirm on the other, the leadership of Utrecht-based Jose Ma. Sison—are amazingly united in trying to railroad the measure, even though they may not agree on anything else.
Leading the charge is Akbayan, the party-list group which has become President Aquino’s most visible partner in running his “program-free coalition government.” Despite the fact that the communists had lost the Cold War worldwide with the collapse of the Soviet Union, they seemed to have gained unusual ascendance in the Philippines. Is this because PNoy’s father, being a shrewd politician, was once a friend of Sison and Bernabe Buscayno before they founded the Maoist CPP and the New People’s Army (NPA) in the 60s. (To be fair to Akbayan, I don't think it is accurate to call it "Communist" in the MLM [Marxist-Leninist-Maoist] sense. Akbayan is nearer to Eurocommunism -- which is considered "revisionist" and anathema by old-style Filipino Communists -- and Socialism. CAP.)
In a radio interview aired over at least 30 stations, Dr. Bullecer warned on Monday against Akbayan’s de facto takeover of Malacañang.
PNoy has named Akbayan’s Roland Llamas, a shooting buddy and (together with Executive Secretary Paquito Ochoa), said to be a constant companion in partygoing, not only his secretary for political affairs but also his unvetted vice chairman of the all-sensitive National Security Council.
Questioned actions
Llamas is said to have written his own job description. He is believed to have succeeded in convincing PNoy to:
(1) Focus his anti-corruption attack on the Armed Forces of the Philippines, while sparing the new lords of corruption at the DILG and PNP, Bureau of Customs, DOTC, DBM, DOH, DSWD, etc. who have simply taken over the multi-billion peso rackets that allegedly used to be run by then First Gentleman Mike Arroyo and his boys during the past administration.
(2) Postpone the ARMM elections without any legitimate reason, so that many suspect that the true reason is that the administration cannot find a “winnable” candidate for governor.
(3) Appropriate P21.9 billion as Conditional Cash Transfer to the DSWD, purportedly as an anti-poverty measure, but in reality to serve as Akbayan’s political war chest for the 2013 senatorial elections, where Llamas close co-worker Riza Hontiveros Baraquel, DSWD Secretary Dinky Soliman, Budget Secretary Butch Abad, losing vice presidential candidate Mar Roxas and some of the congressmen who would be prosecuting Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez at the Senate impeachment trial would be running for senator, mostly likely along with Kris Aquino, the president’s sister.
(4) Use the infamous congressional pork barrel to secure the impeachment by the House of Representatives of Ombudsman Gutierrez and also to make public speeches against her even after her impeachment, in an attempt to divert public attention from the administration’s dismal performance and excessive bungling.
(5) Endorse the RH bill in a big way, and attack the Catholic Church at the same time, in order to regain his sagging popularity rating and overtake Vice President Jejomar Binay by regaining the support of gays, lesbians and others of the liberal persuasions who feel betrayed.
An effort to harm PNoy?
With all these developments, one is made to wonder if there is an an effort to put the President in harm’s way. Pinapahamak ba si Presidente?
PNoy now looks just a little higher than Baraquel, who is already on You Tube campaigning for her 2013 senatorial bid in the guise of personally endorsing the RH bill.
Her campaign ad must be paid for by the foreign-funded Philippine Legislative Committee on Population and Development (PLCPD), the most active arm in Congress of the population controllers.
The authors are worried that PNoy is not giving much consideration and thinking time to his decisions and his pronouncements. He has to weigh his words more carefully and stop sounding like a manipulated puppet.
A Mindanao-based pro-life group called PNoy’s UP statement “a grandiose display of ignorance, arrogance and demagoguery without precedent in the history of Philippine Church-state relations.”
They explain as follows:
First, under Canon Law, excommunication in this case applies to Catholics who take part in an actual abortion. They are excommunicated, latae sententiae, meaning, automatically upon commission of the act, without having to be tried, sentenced and informed by any tribunal that they have been excommunicated. PNoy’s ecclesiastical advisers should know this.
Second, Aquino talks of his “obligation as leader to explain his principles.” What principles are those? Does he not confuse his biases and prejudices with ethical “principles?” There are two well-known “first principles”: the first principle of practical reason, which is to do good and avoid evil; and the first principle of speculative reason, or the principle of non-contradiction, which says something cannot be and not be at the same time.
Utter impossibility
Translation: contraception and sterilization cannot be both bad and good at the same time. The State cannot simultaneously be the constitutional protector of the life of the unborn from conception (ordained by the Constitution) and at the same time the author and executor of a program of contraception and sterilization. It can only be one or the other, not both.
Third, PNoy says he must follow his conscience. Indeed, everyone has a moral duty to follow his conscience. But people must first make sure they have a true or well-formed conscience. No one forms a true conscience by spending most of one’s time on trivial matters and fun pursuits and not seriously studying what is good and bad, what is morally right and morally wrong.
Fourth, like so many Filipinos, PNoy has been misled by his pro-RH friends into believing that the RH bill is about giving women the right to choose whether to practice contraception and sterilization or not, and if so, what kind of contraceptives or sterilization agents to use.
“This is not what the bill is all about,” says former Senator Kit Tatad, a board member of the International Right to Life Federation and the World Youth Alliance, two global pro-life organizations based in the United States.
Despite the Catholic Church’s teaching against contraception and sterilization, no law prohibits them in the Philippines, Tatad points out.
True goal of RH bill
“Everybody is free to do it, and the national contraceptive prevalence rate is already 51 percent and counting. In fact, the government has been appropriating billions for RH since the 1970s, even before they started using the term (RH), under the DOH and POPCOM. This year at least P2 billion has been so appropriated. It is, therefore, a gross deception to say this is what the bill wants to achieve,” the former senator says.
What the RH bill wants to do, he points out, is:
(1) to make fertility or birth control, even by unethical means, an essential aspect and compulsory requirement of marriage; and (2) to make the State the supplier of contraception and sterilization, despite its being constitutionally mandated to equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from the moment of conception, and to defend the right of couples to found a family according to their religious convictions.
For that reason, the RH bill is “void ab initio [void from the very beginning],” Tatad said.
“I can’t understand why not a single one of those lawyers trying to railroad this legislation seems able to read correctly the simple provisions of Article II and Article XV of the Constitution, which provide no room whatsoever for the proposed legislation. Since ignorance of the law excuses no one, even the non-lawyers should be able to see what these provisions mean,” he added.
Destruction of the family
Not only is the bill unconstitutional, Tatad said. As far as he is concerned, it seeks the destruction of the family and marriage, which is founded on the God-given gift of procreation, and the destruction of the democratic state, which recognizes the right of couples to live their married life according to their religious convictions, in favor of the totalitarian state, which seeks to control the private lives of its citizens.
“The Nazis did this to captive peoples during World War II. And the Allies condemned it as a crime against humanity at the Nuremberg war trials. That the apostate powers have since enacted into law the evil they had once condemned is no reason we should import the same evil into our system,” Tatad said.
We feel that if the President continues on this crooked path, conservative Catholics will be driven to revolt.
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