Obfuscation is corruption

“You heard,” says Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas, “when candidate, now President Noynoy Aquino, said during his campaign, ‘Kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap.’ Contraception is corruption. The use of government money, taxpayers’ money to give out contraceptive pills is corruption. Contraceptive pills teach us it is all right to have sex with someone provided you are safe from babies. Babies are a nuisance….”

What a thing to say.

At the very least, it’s hypocritical. I’ve always wondered why priests and their superiors pass themselves off as marriage, or indeed sex, counselors when they know nothing about the one or the other. At least about marriage, they know a lot about sex, firsthand. But I’ll get to that. Certainly, they know absolutely nothing about childbirth, not witnessing a wife in the throes of it (or indeed carrying a child for nine months), and not witnessing, or particularly wanting to witness, women giving birth in maternal wards, free or charity, and in hovels, under care of betel-chewing neighborhood midwives.

Which by itself constitutes a formidable argument for having women priests (or pastors). What theological reason is there not to? They should have a better appreciation for the agony, as much as the ecstasy, of child-giving. In fact, they should have a better appreciation for the agony—the ecstasy is debatable—of child-rearing. Particularly the rearing not of one or two children but a dozen of them, separated by only a year, the mother emaciated and looking 70 after all those births, wondering where the money will come from to feed the brood, never mind buy medicine for the sick middle child, or, suntok sa buwan, send one or two to school. Socrates, ironically named after a wise man, should step out of his archbishop’s palace, and smell the real world.

You want to see “babies are a nuisance,” don’t look at those who believe in experiencing the love, joy and sheer bliss of sex—yes, Virginia, sex is not evil—without recklessly producing “un-feed-able” mouths. Look only at those priests and bishops who like having sex with their parishioners, or indeed as the scandals rocking the Vatican show, harassing them, and having babies by them. The only thing going for them is that they practice what they preach, they do not use condoms. But after having babies by them, leaving them to rear them, if not abandoning them altogether. Lovers are a nuisance, if indeed you might call them so, love having nothing to do with it. Children even more so, they are not just a nuisance, they are living reminders, no a perpetual indictment, of one’s fall from grace. They have to be renounced, dyahe to be known as father in addition to Father.

At the very most, it’s pestilential. You smirk at P-Noy’s “pag walang corrupt, walang mahirap,” you damn the one thing that has given this country hope for a better life. You jeer at P-Noy’s “pag walang corrupt, walang mahirap,” you raise a dirty finger at the one thing that embodies decency, morality and spirituality in this country, which is government’s desire to punish the tyrants of the past, to jail the criminals of the past, the better to not make them and their maleficence carry over into the future.

No, more than that, you say, “Contraception is corruption,” you corrupt the very meaning of corruption, you corrupt the very essence of corruption, you champion the bringers of the plague and applaud the rottenness, the decay, the putrescence they have spread upon this land. You say “Contraception is corruption,” you say that Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whom you have welcomed with open arms, is pure as the driven snow, how can she be corrupt, she hates contraception, how can she be corrupt when she is one of us?

You say “Contraception is corruption,” you say there’s nothing wrong with being put in Malacañang by Garci and not God, there’s nothing wrong with overpricing Chinese broadband to the astonishment of the Chinese themselves, there’s nothing wrong with kidnapping Jun Lozada and massacring activists to keep power, there’s nothing wrong with punishing the innocent and rewarding the guilty.

You say, “Contraception is corruption,” you say there’s nothing wrong with bishops saying “Everyone cheats anyway” when their flock has just heard Arroyo plotting with Garci to kidnap a public school teacher for having witnessed massive fraud, for defending her to the death or at least to the end of her term and quite possibly beyond, a threat thwarted only by Cory departing for heaven. You say, “Contraception is corruption,” you say there’s nothing oppressive about harking to Arroyo’s call to pray for her but being deaf to the prayers of those she lied to, cheated, stole from. Who cares about them, they’re poor, they do not speak Spanish or Latin which is the language of God, and, hell, they probably use contraceptives anyway?

You say, “Contraception is corruption,” you find nothing laughable about being deeply moved from your mitered head to your stockinged feet about what Filipino Catholics send flying to a tissue paper or to a condom, kawawa naman, it’s a prospective baby that won’t be born, but being smug about the woman the drunken cop goes home to and orders around when he wants sex, he needs sex, preferably with impregnation so his barkada won’t laugh at him for being butas ang tambucho.

You say, “Contraception is corruption,” how in God’s name can you be Socratic? You say “Contraception is corruption,” you condemn the world in God’s name to a living hell.

No, contraception is not corruption. Hypocrisy is. Ignorance is.

Obfuscation is.