Viewpoint
Sound chamber
By Juan L. MercadoAs the May 13 elections campaign careens into homestretch, many candidates get strident. There are 18,053 posts up for grabs—almost quadruple of that is the number of office seekers.
As the May 13 elections campaign careens into homestretch, many candidates get strident. There are 18,053 posts up for grabs—almost quadruple of that is the number of office seekers.
The Kris Aquino/James Yap and Chiz Escudero/Heart Evangelista brawls triggered a blogging frenzy. “There are more pressing concerns,” former Sen. Richard “Dick” Gordon protested. These range from Filipinos squeezed in the Sabah controversy to a severely strained school system. “Let’s keep our focus on issues that matter.”
I have been getting a fair share of comments on my columns and blog posts about the Reproductive Health bill issue. As one would expect, not everyone is willing to raise me to sainthood. Some would even consign me to the darker regions. It is interesting to note, however, that the comments are almost all anonymous, whatever that means.
In Neal Cruz’s column, “Enrile: RH bill hangs in balance in Senate” (Inquirer, 9/12/12), he says, “On contraception, Enrile echoed the Church’s argument that once fertilization takes place in the womb there already is life and we do not have the moral right to terminate life.”
A couple of days ago, Bishop Gabriel Reyes of the Diocese of Antipolo, writing under the stationery of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, published an ad in the Inquirer and Philippine Star, expressing his disagreement with the views of an unnamed columnist on the merits and demerits of the Reproductive Health bill. The regular readers of my columns in the Inquirer immediately recognized that the bishop was referring to me. I too recognized it immediately as referring to me.
This is probably an unthinkable framework by which to make a judgment on the Reproductive Health bill. How many of us are in awe of mathematical figures and formulas? But that is exactly what three scientists have done in a study that correlates contraceptive use and abortion rate. The study was published last March 26 only.
Most published commentaries against the Reproductive Health bill, including some reactions to my posted comments in websites and blogs last Aug. 17 (“More on the RH bill: a definition of life”), show poor public understanding of science. I thought of sharing a summary of my replies to some of them, in particular, about the nature of science.
The Reproductive Health bill has become hot topic in lunch conversations and kwentuhan even among us high school students. Many of us follow the news and read the papers to keep ourselves updated, but despite the pro-RH bill stories, videos and campaign materials, we stand firm in our belief: The RH bill is not only detrimental to the Filipino society, it is also a poor excuse for taking the easy way out and earn money in the process.
The circumstances surrounding the acts of plagiarism committed by Sen. Vicente Sotto III, in the first two installments of his controversial “turno en contra” speech at the Senate last week, are so comical, so ridiculous, they invite disbelief. Did Sotto, the majority leader, really tell ANC’s Karen Davila that he was not obliged to attribute the passage he and his staff lifted almost word for word, comma for misplaced comma, from American blogger Sarah Pope because “blogger lang ’yon [she’s only a blogger]”?
Getting viral by the hour in cyberspace is a petition written and initiated by Dr. Ricardo B. Boncan, an alumnus and parent of the Ateneo de Manila University. The petition can be signed online at www.gopetition.com/petitions/re-claim-the-catholic-identity-of-the-ateneo-de-manila.html. I give way to Doctor Boncan’s petition, of which the publication in this space of an abridged and edited version he has so graciously permitted.
President Aquino may be chuckling behind his hand at the way in which his remark about “responsible parenthood” put a cat in the chicken coop. Amid the excited cackling that followed the President’s remark, it took Prof. Bernardo Villegas of Opus Dei to remind listeners on Radio Veritas that responsible parenthood is part of the Catholic moral tradition. Popes and bishops around the world as well as Philippine bishops have many times used it in insisting that, while a new life is a gift from God, parents should not procreate indiscriminately. Rather, they should strive, using natural family planning (NFP) if called for, to have only the number of children that they can provide for properly.
It was unfortunate that the highlight of the much-ballyhooed “show of force” the Catholic bishops organized at the Edsa Shrine last Saturday turned out to be a deliberate lie. “My dear youth,” ran the most emphatic line from the most provocative statement read at the rally called to protest the Reproductive Health bill pending in Congress, “contraception is corruption. The use of government money, taxpayers’ money to give out contraceptive pills is corruption.”
