Bittersweet politics

Now that I am no longer working on-cam for Aksyon TV Channel 41 and Radyo 5 with my radio show, “Remoto Control,” I can now write openly about politics. I’ve been in politics officially since September 1, 2003, when I founded Ladlad Party-list, which CNN has called as “the only gay [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] party in the world.”

I wanted to file for party-list accreditation in 2004, but we did not have enough achievements from September 2003 to November 2003, which was the deadline month for the filing. So I deferred and took a research scholarship at the National University of Singapore (NUS), funded by the Asian Scholarship Foundation, to write a monograph on Malaysian Poetry in English. And since much of the early work on this literature is found in the University of Malaya (now the NUS), I got a grant to read the archival work.

From my big and clean faculty room at the English Language and Literature Department at NUS, I watched the 2004 elections unfold through the Internet. I watched Senator Raul Roco run even if he already had prostate cancer, and saw how the popular Fernando Poe Jr. campaign for a job he obviously did not like. Of course, Mrs. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo won that election, thanks to alleged help from Comelec magic man Mr. Virgilio Garcillano.

I filed the Ladlad papers for the 2007, but Comelec thumbed us down for allegedly having less than the required number of regional chapters. There were 13 regions then, and we had eight chapters listed, so I was not sure if Comelec knew how to count with the Arabic numerals. We also had a hearing where then Comelec Commissioner Ruben Abalos said that we should not run for elections, since our gay members “only go out at night. You are all phantom voters.” Not to be outdone, I said: “With all due respect, Commissioner Abalos, we are not phantoms. We are the opera.”Everybody laughed, except Abalos. He asked his aide why everybody was laughing, and when he was informed about the allusion, he just gave a smile that made his carabao-like skin look more dry than it already was.

In 2010 we had the required number of regional chapters, a long list of members, and a thick folder of achievements. And so I filed our papers again, only to be refused by three commissioners who, misquoting the Bible and the Holy Koran, said we are “a threat to the youth” and misread the constitutional provision on the separation of Church and State. Since we were not a Taliban state, I knew that this time, the Comelec fudged it, and I sued them in the Supreme Court.

What vexed me so was the bullying they did, particularly to me. In a press conference funded by my taxpayer’s money, Commissioner Nicodemus Ferrer badmouthed my party and I in such a high-handed fashion that two people – then Commissioner on Human Rights Leila de Lima and Mayor Rodrigo Duterte – separately issued statements in support of our fight for gender equality. Mayor Duterte said to me, “There are even more gay people there in Comelec, so why aren’t they allowing you to run? They’re such hypocrites!” I already bleeped from there the two crisp expletives he said to describe the Comelec. He also offered his services to us as a lawyer pro bono.

Commissioner Ferrer did not answer Mayor Duterte, maybe out of fear, but he instead attacked me. He said that I am ignorant about the law and should just keep quiet about legal matters. I answered that some lawyers know the law, but let legal ethics fly out of the window. My coup d’grace was this: “I do not want to debate with intellectual pygmies.” After that, there was silence. The silence of the lambs.

The Supreme Court, by a vote of 13-2, allowed us to run three weeks before the May 2007 elections. The other party-list groups had three months to campaign; we only had three weeks! We lost by a margin of 10,000 votes, and ran again in the May 2013 elections where – thanks to the magic of computerized elections – we lost by a margin of 50,000 votes.

Why do I keep on running? Why don’t I just go back to the US, where almost all of my family members now reside and live quiet and comfortable lives?

As one feisty, female governor told me, “Danton, it would be such a waste to let thieves handle government funds.”

And so I am running again, this time as a nominee of Melchora Party-list, whose advocacy includes work for the empowerment of women and of LGBTs. Contrary to the propaganda being waged by another intellectual pygmy in cyberspace, I am not misrepresenting women. If he has bothered to read the April 2013 Supreme Court decision on party-list groups, you do not have to belong to the sector of the party-list, as long as you have a track record working for its advocacy. I am not a woman but I joined the campaign for the passage of the Reproductive Health bill, as one of its early advocates and in my work with the United Nations in the Philippines; I have written about the rights of women, including the rights of lesbians and transgendered women, in my books; and my columns and articles in the past 30 years have always supported maternal health and the rights of homemakers, the rights of migrant women, and of women in the workplace.

I do not know what it is about Philippine politics that it has turned some of the formerly kind people I know into strident bullies. Being narrow-minded, they think there is only one model for development (theirs) and only one way to form solidarity groups (theirs). The borderless world of social media has turned them into monsters, answerable to no one except their few coterie, who press the button to show they “like” another shout-out from their spokesmen, whose bitter facade is only a shadow-play for the emptiness of their lives.

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