Tokenism

With a stroke of the pen, President Arroyo has abolished capital punishment. There are people willing to believe that she did it out of a genuine respect for life, noting that she never affirmed a death sentence during her five years in power, and noting her avowed devotion to the Roman Catholic faith, which frowns on capital punishment.

Other people are not convinced, noticing that the death penalty law was repealed on the eve of her departure for the Vatican where she would meet with Pope Benedict XVI and invite him to visit the Philippines. Others also remember her marching alongside rape victim "Baby" Echegaray, supporting capital punishment back when it was fashionable.

Perhaps the President, who claims a divine mandate and is a firm believer in providence, is a genuine opponent of capital punishment. While she marched together with Baby Echegaray, one’s outlook can change if every life-and-death decision on death row is on your head. This is a responsibility no one can want.

But public skepticism will always be there. It stems from a long experience with hypocrisy and tokenism among politicians — a zeal for causes as long as the TV cameras are rolling and newspaper photographers are clicking away. Political commitment to a cause often flags as soon as public interest shifts and the cameras move on.

To be fair, the President is not the only public official accused of tokenism. There is so much hypocrisy especially when it comes to religious devotion and sexuality in this predominantly Roman Catholic country.

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You have councilors banning the theater run of The Da Vinci Code in Manila, a city where pirated copies of the movie are openly sold together with all the hardcore porn and violent films on DVD.

You have a government backing down on its plan to introduce sex education in public high schools, leaving teenagers to discover sexuality on TV, in the movies and the Internet. Let the parents teach the kids about sexuality? Here’s the typical teenage reaction to discussing sex with mom and dad: Eeeww!

You have known philanderers vowing to block any attempt to legalize divorce, not out of religious beliefs but mainly because they think it would be toxic for their political future to go against the Church. And besides, who wants to be compelled to pay alimony?

Some of the country’s most colorful characters like making a public show of their religious devotion.

Imelda Marcos is a devout Catholic. At the height of her power, she filled Malacañang Palace with religious icons, many of which were jewel-encrusted. Some statues were about 20 feet tall, with crowns fit for royalty.

Former Mayor Antonio Sanchez of Calauan, Laguna was a devotee of "Mama Mary" and filled his mansion with religious icons adorned with gems and semi-precious stones. When he was on trial together with his henchmen for the gang-rape of university coed Mary Eileen Sarmenta and her gruesome murder along with her friend Alan Gomez, there was an apocryphal story that Sanchez would walk on bended knees from the entrance of a church to the altar before ordering a hit on anyone. Such stories enhance myths built around political warlords in this country and are often encouraged by those who want to tell friend and foe alike, "Don’t mess with me."

It’s not unusual to learn that notorious crooks and public figures linked to murders are regular churchgoers. Some of them wear crosses or religious medallions around their necks, mainly as amulets.

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Unfortunately for this country, religious devotion does not seem to come into play especially in matters involving corruption, smuggling and similar crimes.

This could be due in part to perceptions that the Church does not seem to be as strong in its objections to those crimes as it is in its promotion of Church teachings on matters such as contraception, marital fidelity and divorce and, yes, capital punishment.

That perception has been reinforced by previous active campaigns by the Church against the election of proponents of contraception such as Sen. Juan Flavier and known womanizers such as Joseph Estrada. Incidentally, both were elected, Estrada by a landslide, which should make our politicians wonder if there is a Catholic vote in this country.

If the bishops don’t make enough noise about a particular sin, those professing to be devout are at peace with their conscience. Some of them start their day with a Mass, and pray for divine guidance every day on creative ways of making fat commissions from government contracts.

A man suspected of large-scale tax evasion is one of the largest donors to Church charities. You won’t hear the bishops denouncing this man as a tax cheat.

The Church in this country has been criticized for the view, expressed by some bishops, that it is not wrong to accept dirty money for a good cause. Bishops rail against jueteng but the Church accepts donations from known gambling lords. The Church is also one of the largest recipients of proceeds from state-sponsored gambling.

That attitude has made the Catholic faithful ignore bishops’ warnings against illegal gambling. But it has not stopped politicians from conducting endless investigations, ostensibly in aid of legislation, on illegal gambling activities.

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Scratch the surface of some avowed devout Catholics in this country, especially the grandstanding political types, and you may find a thief of sorts, a serial philanderer and even a pedophile and wife-beater.

Many people have wondered why a nation where religion seems to play such a major role continues to be ranked among the world’s most corrupt.

One of the few countries in the world where divorce is banned is also a country where men openly take pride in philandering.

Family planning, low in the administration’s totem pole of priorities, has become a privilege of the affluent and educated.

In the country that has just abolished capital punishment, journalists and suspected communist sympathizers are targets in a turkey shoot, and summary execution is a law enforcement tool.