Barbara Talaga still mayor of Lucena—SC

Here is the latest chapter in the ongoing mayoral fight in Lucena, in the province of Quezon:

The Supreme Court en banc has stopped the Commission on Elections from implementing its resolution of June 16, 2011 unseating Barbara Ruby Talaga as mayor of Lucena and replacing her with Vice Mayor Roderick Alcala. So now it is still Talaga who is Lucena mayor and Alcala is back as its vice mayor.

However, the Department of Interior and Local Government under Secretary Jesse Robredo and the Comelec are dragging their feet in implementing the high court’s decision. The DILG said it was the Comelec that issued the resolution replacing Talaga with Alcala so it should be the Comelec that should tell them to go back to their old positions. And the Comelec is playing deaf, dumb and blind to the SC decision. It is not doing anything to enforce the SC order. The conspiracy and malice to rob the people of Lucena of their elected mayor is too obvious.

City Administrator Ramon Talaga has issued an order to all city officials and employees to follow orders of Mayor Talaga and not those of Vice Mayor Alcala, but critics of the couple said that Ramon’s order himself should not be followed because his appointment as city administrator is co-terminus with the term of his wife-mayor, Barbara Ruby. And when she was unseated, they said, he was also unseated.

But now that the Supreme Court issued its order to observe the status quo before the Comelec issued its disputed resolution, doesn’t that make Barbara the mayor and Ramon the city administrator?

The case is not very difficult to resolve. Talaga was elected mayor of Lucena with a margin of more than 4,000 votes. But four men in their cozy air-conditioned offices in Manila decided to replace the tens of thousands of votes of the Lucena folk with their own four votes by voting to disqualify her and replace her with Alcala, who did not even run for mayor but for the position of vice mayor. The reason? Allegedly because Talaga filed her certificate of candidacy a few hours too early, before her husband, former Mayor Ramon Talaga, had withdrawn his own certificate of candidacy.

Alcala was told to replace her as mayor under the rules of succession which says that in case of a vacancy in the mayoralty, the vice mayor takes over. It is a long-standing ruling of the Supreme Court that the second highest ranking candidate cannot take the place of the disqualified mayor because a majority of the voters did not vote for him.

In the Comelec voting, four commissioners voted for the majority opinion, one (Chairman Sixto Brillantes) dissented and one abstained. It is Brillantes’ dissenting opinion that is sensible. He said that the people of Lucena voted for Talaga. Their votes should be respected. The alleged premature filing of her certificate of candidacy was a mere technical glitch. And the legal principle is that in a conflict between the substance of the law and a technicality, substance takes priority and the technicality takes a back seat.

Brillantes said that whatever the technical infirmity, the people of Lucena still knew that Talaga was the candidate and voted for her. Don’t rob them of their choice by using technical gobbledygook. Well said.

May I add that what the Comelec majority has done, disqualify the winner, is also a favorite ploy of bids and awards committees. Winning bidders for government projects are disqualified, for one technicality or another, so that the project can be awarded to a favorite, and higher, bidder. And we know that it is easy to find a technical infirmity when you look for one.

That was the same thing that was done in the case of Lucena Mayor Talaga.

I repeat: Don’t cheat the people of Lucena out of the mayor they elected.

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A reader, a confessed cockfight aficionado, wrote a letter to the editor, disputing an item here that cockfighting is cruel to the fighting cocks. Unthinking humans, I said, make cocks fight to the death by tying deadly, razor-sharp spurs to the legs of the cocks. The fight is over within minutes with one or both of the cocks either dead or wounded. Isn’t this cruelty?

The reader said No. Fighting cocks are “bred to fight,” he said, and when you put two of them together, even many meters apart, they would find each other and fight to the death.

Wrong. They would fight, but not to the death, if sabungeros do not attach those deadly spurs to their legs. They would still fight, but after about 15 minutes or so they would get tired and one of them would run away. So the other cock wins.

Sabungeros can still enjoy their favorite gambling pastime (I don’t want to call it a sport because it is not). It is gambling per se because the sabungeros bet on the cocks. Cockfights would not be that addictive without the gambling.

But aficionados can still enjoy cockfights without the blood and gore and death by not attaching those man-made deadly spurs. The cocks will still fight but none of them need to die. Let them fight until one decides to quit and run away. The other one is declared the winner. The gamblers can still bet on them, but their sin is lessened because no cock has to lose its life. The loser can fight again another day, using what it has learned the first time to fight better next time.

Civilization is improving and man is learning not to be cruel—to animals and to fellow humans. Boxing, for example, which used to be bare-knuckle fights, now use padded boxing gloves. Bullfighting, which is a cultural tradition and a tourist attraction in Spain and Mexico, is being merciful to the bulls. More and more, the bulls are not killed. And dog-fighting and dog-racing are now outlawed in the United States, as they are now outlawed in the Philippines along with horse-fighting. Cockfighting is also now outlawed in the United States.