Power play

Boxing champion Manny Pacquiao should open his mouth more often about the Reproductive Health bill. He’s the best showcase for all the holes in the opposition to the bill. His wife Jinkee, who had the knowledge and the means to use the pill when she wanted to, is also a showcase of the hypocrisy of RH opponents.

Then there’s Pacquiao’s mom Dionisia, trying in vain to pick a fight with Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago for insulting the boxer’s IQ. “Pacmom” should also open her mouth more often about these things. While I truly admire her natural flair for comedy, she’s a showcase of the distraction that has been employed to prevent millions of impoverished women from having their right to reproductive health protected by the state.

I say impoverished because women of better education and means – such as billionaires’ wives like Jinkee – are aware of their choices in spacing childbirth. The affluent and educated can afford to consult doctors for family planning counseling. They can afford pills or IUD and their spouses or lovers can afford condoms.

I’ve written about this before: I’ve known women of less fortunate circumstances whose method of spacing childbirth is jumping from the top of a coconut tree to dislodge the fetus in their belly. Others drink tea made from abortifacient herbs bought from stalls near the Quiapo church. Still others, including teenage students, go to a midwife who gives them a wire shaped like the hook in a clothes hanger for use to scrape out the fetus.

When all else fails, some women have the baby, and then leave the infant in a public toilet or at the doorstep of a church. Since it’s the Catholic Church that keeps reminding its flock about the biblical admonition to go forth and multiply, it should share the burden of the consequences.

Never mind if that admonition was given at a time when there were so few of God’s Chosen People that it was OK for men to impregnate their own daughters and their brothers’ wives – all in the spirit of procreation, which is the only acceptable reason for copulation, as far as the Vatican is concerned.

I can’t find this portion about kosher sex in any of the teachings of Jesus Christ. A pro-RH bishop told me this is embodied in an encyclical passed during the time of Pope Paul VI. Maybe it was a reaction to the sexual revolution that swept the world in the late 1960s. The bishop said Pope Paul deleted one of the two reasons allowed by the Church for sex – the “unitive” part – and left only the “procreative.”

From the sex scandals still sweeping the Catholic Church around the world, I guess even shepherds of the flock didn’t think the encyclical was realistic. It’s like the Catholic ban on divorce: philandering macho Pinoys simply take a mistress or two, or why not five? There’s also a Catholic divorce, granted directly by the Vatican, but only for the rich.

Divorce is legal in Rome, and everywhere else except in two countries: Malta and the Philippines. The Church probably fears that passage of the RH bill would pave the way for a divorce law in this country.

The Church is still paying, literally, for the sexual dalliances of its clergy that it covered up for years, with the settlements so huge dioceses have gone bankrupt.

Those scandals have surely contributed to the growing ranks of people in the United States and other countries who describe themselves in official documents to be practicing no religion. Another contributing factor has to be violent extremism carried out in the name of the perpetrators’ God.

Religion is a matter of personal belief, and in this Age of Tolerance, it’s no longer politically correct (or safe) to insist that there is only one true faith or God. In this Age, one faith’s deity could be another’s heretic or infidel.

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When Pablo Garcia locks horns with Edcel Lagman on the RH bill, I hope they’re talking about the same God. Maybe they should invite non-Catholic Christian and Muslim lawmakers into the debate, and first agree on a definition of terms. Who, exactly, is the House referring to when God is invoked? And who can legitimately claim to have a direct line to God?

Some quarters are even questioning the propriety of believing that God is a Father, and wondering why there’s no mother in that heavenly trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Women have long been relegated to secondary roles in this Church, deemed unfit for ordination or representation in Vatican policy-making. Do nuns have lower IQs or weaker moral fiber than priests? It would be interesting to hear Senator Miriam’s views on this.

Church opposition to the promotion of women’s reproductive health is only in keeping with this sexual discrimination.

In the Philippines, it’s also partly about political power – the latest installment in a power struggle between Church and state that started as soon as the friars and Spanish colonizers set up shop in these islands in the 16th century. Back then you could be burned at the stake if you insisted, against Church teachings, that the Earth was round and was not the center of the universe. Strong-willed women were burned as witches.

The Philippines is one of only a handful of countries where the Church still influences (or tries to, under P-Noy) government policymaking. It’s good that this president didn’t owe his election to the Catholic bishops and has no fear of excommunication or the fires of hell. While he’s at it, maybe he should lift the tax exemption enjoyed by religious groups. How can any bishop threaten the government with non-payment of taxes?

It’s also good to know that there are priests, among them Fr. Joaquin Bernas who happens to be a respected constitutional expert, who have argued forcefully for the RH bill.

There’s been a lot of medieval obfuscation about this bill, about its supposed promotion of abortion, about the evils of sex education. Only reasoned debate, not the invocation of the name of one’s God, will clear the air.

I don’t understand why the Church is scared of giving women choices. Even Adam and Eve were allowed to exercise free will. If Church teachings are so effective, the faithful will reject pills and condoms even if given away for free.

In the past two millennia, the Church has been a force for immense good. But in this debate some princes of the Church can sound like politicians, who love the masses just the way they are: poor, illiterate, and capable of blind obedience.

Education and informed choice are a threat to that kind of power base.