MANILA, Philippines - It is difficult for many, myself included, to be totally for or totally against the RH bill because it has many faces. The issues it presents are not just sociological, or constitutional, or moral, or religious. Thus one has to choose what to write about, what to agree with and what to disagree with.
The issue is not just about or mainly about religious belief. We are in many ways united as a believing people. We are tolerant of contrary religious beliefs. But what more deeply divides us is how the relationship between religion and government should be structured. Let me say a word about this.
It is evident that religion has provided many of the values which guide government policy about the human person. In many ways we have followed this course in matters commonly held. The laws we have for instance on abortion and marriage flow from religious values. Catholics, Protestants or Muslims can agree about many things.
But there are also those who seek to persuade government to adopt values not commonly held and to impose them on others. In a sense they seek to promote an ?evangelical? government. In the current controversy, the evangelizing Catholics among them, for instance, would favor legislating ?Humanae Vitae.?
Other citizens, many of them also firm believers, allow religious values to direct their private lives, but they would not allow government to impose them on themselves or on others. Their concern is that legislating values that come from religion but are not commonly held will divide the nation. They are for a government free from religious dictation but not hostile to religion. They seek to maintain national unity in the midst of religious diversity.
The fundamental fact of the matter is that our nation today is characterized by religious diversity more pronounced than when we first accepted a democratic system of government. We have chosen to reject the established church of Spanish times. But ?We,? the sovereign people in the Preamble of our Constitution, who have covenanted to ?establish a government that shall embody our ideals? are a people who, while firmly adhering to certain common ideals, are nevertheless divided in many vital matters, many of them flowing from religious belief. Hence for the purpose of maintaining unity amid diversity we have also covenanted to respect religious liberty within a system that institutionally divides church and state.
Our embrace of religious liberty is a manifestation of our belief that religion is profoundly meaningful and that we can draw from religion guidance in our social and political options. At the same time, however, we have also drawn a demarcation line, not always clear, which separates the functions of government and religion, thereby potentially severing government from a source of social and moral values dear to many believing citizens.
On the one hand we have decided to avoid the extreme of a purely secular state like that of France; on the other hand we do not want a state governed by religion like some Muslim states. We consider religion as possessing an important role in government. In the Preamble to our Constitution we implore the aid of God. At the same time, however, we do not wish government to interfere with religion nor religion to rule government.
Maintaining the balance between religious liberty and church-state separation is a continuing challenge. Years ago when I was a schoolboy we had the Noli-Fili controversy. We outgrew that. Today the RH bill is challenging our capacity to deal with the balancing task. We must ask: Which side in the controversy is being unreasonable?
The RH bill is by no means a perfect document. I do not believe that the authors of the bill themselves consider their work sacrosanct or rock-permanent. They must realize that there are provisions in the bill which run counter to the moral beliefs of some. They cannot overlook the fact that moral rules of our society and much of our civil law are based on religious values. At the same time, however, we must also realize that in our religiously pluralist society we can differ in matters of morality, especially sexual morality. Neither, however, is the bill totally bad. There are provisions in the bill which seek to answer the crying needs of women and important needs of young people, especially among the poor.
The bill is a mixed bag. And the disagreements about the bill are not just between religion and government. They are multi-polar. They are also between and among different religious beliefs and also within religions. For instance, within the Catholic religion there is no mass adherence to the hard-line position taken by some members of the Catholic hierarchy. For that matter, it would be interesting to see what the result would be if all members of the hierarchy were to be polled about the subject.
What is obviously needed is for people to come and reason together in an atmosphere of open give and take. We should not allow our nation to be divided by God. There should be room for respecting religious liberty as well as openness not only to drawing the difficult dividing line between religion and government but also to exploring areas where the two institutions, church and government, and the various religions can work together. Unless this is done before the bill leaves Congress, or unless the bill is broken up into ?swallowable? doses, it will run the risk of a presidential veto or it will spawn intensive litigation. Roe v. Wade was decided 25 years ago. US courts are still debating it as late as yesterday.
