The Long View
An intrinsically disordered response
By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:28:00 04/28/2008
MANILA, Philippines - It was lawyer-blogger The Warrior Lawyer who (most elegantly) labeled it “The Cebu Posterior Surgery Scandal.” The institutional response has been appropriate and encouraging. The adverse effects this scandal will have on medical tourism in that city, might, quite possibly, be extensive.
The Warrior Lawyer pointed out that the whole tragic story involves the kind of humor that feasts on personal tragedy, to which all humans are susceptible—as witnessed, for example, by the kind of double-entendre puns he and most commenters have found irresistible: “Congresswoman Risa Hontiveros-Baraquel to file House Resolution 524 asking for a probe,” and “the surgical team saved the guy’s life, even if, in the process, he was made to look like an ass.”
It’s been interesting to see what people in Cebu have to say. Columnist Joseph Gonzales in his April 20 Freeman column praised the unfortunate patient for demanding justice, and said that the tragedy will hopefully teach medical practitioners not to take a small-town approach to patient care. As Gonzales pointed out, “It’s actually become normal for those with the means to avoid being tested [for HIV] in Cebu, since they know that any positive result will most certainly be [broadcast] in the local community.”
A healthy debate has also ensued on how media and officialdom handle the privacy of victims and suspects. It’s not as if media doesn’t regularly intrude on patients, to put their medical tragedies on display to titillate their viewers. Think of all the efforts to raise funds for kids with birth defects: it’s a televised Freak Show.
But allow me to focus on God’s greatest gift to the clergy of Cebu, Monsignor Achilles Dacay. He’s been on a roll, hasn’t he? Prior to his response to the Cebu Posterior Surgery Scandal, he was fussing over the President’s proposal to distribute rice through Catholic parishes. Apparently, he was concerned that together with rice, condoms would be distributed to the poor, since one of the rice problem’s causes is population growth.
When the story broke of the unfortunate patient and the extraction of that spray can from his posterior, the jolly Monsignor decided to approach the issue a priori: homosexual acts are sinful, they are intrinsically disordered behavior, ergo: “People are not talking about what happened before the operation—the homosexual act that was done very badly.” So said Dacay to the media, by way of commenting on the heat that was being applied to the doctors, nurses and their pals from the Vicente Sotto Memorial Hospital and their posting a YouTube video to immortalize their surgical skills and the gay old time they had.
By all accounts, the surgery itself was quite a feat. The medical consensus seems to be that it was an impressive surgical achievement; the public consensus is that the doctors and nurses and their pals ruined it by recording the procedure and jeering at the patient.
The people (and the institutions that condemned the offending physicians and their partners in mocking) have been correct in zeroing in on the real issue. After all, the physician’s job is to treat the patient, not to render moral verdicts on them. The patient, more than anyone, has ample opportunity before and after surgery to reflect on and mourn the circumstances that led to a life-threatening situation.
To be sure, in Dacay’s defense, it is his job as a priest to render moral verdicts on people. The question, then, is whether he did so without appearing to be a cuckoo in a cassock. The tender sensibilities of Monsignor Dacay, perhaps, makes it impossible for him to conceive of anal sex and more to the point, that it is a sexual act that isn’t uniquely homosexual—an instructive demonstration of the dangers of not having sufficient sex education.
It seems to me his statement was along the lines of the sort of imbeciles who, upon seeing that a prostitute was raped, proceed to denounce the victim not only because she’s a prostitute, but a woman. The kind who mutter that while rape is wrong, let us not fail to recall that if she wasn’t a prostitute (and a woman), none of this would have happened.
So let us approach the tragedy, instead, a posteriori: based on the empirical facts. By all accounts, a spray can end up lodged in the rectum of the patient, because he’d insulted the size of the manhood of a male prostitute, who then took it upon himself to retaliate by inserting said can, when the patient passed out from consuming too much alcohol.
The moral, for our moral guardians out there, if it isn’t absurd to use that word, of the story obviously then is this: don’t insult someone’s endowment and then pass out, leaving yourself open to retaliation. He jeered at his sexual partner, he got jeered at by the doctors.
But all the jeering serves to underscore the reality that this whole tragedy was about power. If it’s true the person originally jeered at was a male prostitute, it’s about the power of the client over the prostitute, and the retaliation of the prostitute who has no financial power but had his client at his mercy when the client passed out.
American policemen sodomized an African-American detainee with a broom handle and American soldiers did the same thing to Iraqi prisoners, not because it gave them sexual pleasure but because it was a form of humiliation men are particularly ashamed to experience.
So when Monsignor Dacay viewed the tragedy as a some sort of lesson on the evils of homosexuality, one could propose that he ought to have viewed it as a lesson on the combined dangers of literally hitting below the belt and of the dangers of drunkenness. He missed out on all the other issues the tragedy raised, and instead appeared more interested in blaming the victim and shielding those who unquestionably violated a patient’s rights. The most charitable thing to say about him is that he’s a clumsy pastor.
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