komentaryo

the travesty of the Pinoy Church 2: life and death in Quiapo

today, the Pinoy Catholic Church gathered people to pray away the President’s decision to educate all Filipinos about family planning and give them the right to choose what to do. they also gathered to pray away the RH Bill and the probability that it will be passed into law.

the Pinoy Church elders invoke the name of the President’s mother: she wouldn’t do this, they say, she was close to bishops, she was saintly, she listened to the Church. Archbishop Aniceto says: “the country must learn to embrace the gift of life and to defend it against the ‘culture of death’.”

the Pinoy Church’s faithful carried placards with photos of aborted fetuses.

this connection between family planning/birth control/the RH Bill and aborted fetuses is a lie that the Pinoy Church has sold pretty well. they speak of contraceptives and abortifacients as one and the same, they speak of artificial family planning in the same vein as killing off babies. this is a lie.

any definition of contraception will tell you that Pinoy Church elders are wrong: contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, injectibles, condoms do not kill babies. they keep women from conceiving.

there is no baby, there is no abortion. in fact there is nothing in the woman’s uterus (which she solely owns by the way). there’s no nothing.

except 11 women who die during childbirth every day, women who get pregnant emotionally and physically unprepared for it, women who can barely survive the pregnancy, women who leave their babies because they don’t know what else to do. women who are unprotected by the State, are ill-informed if not uneducated about their rights to their bodies, their right to their lives.

and right there in Quiapo, where the CBCP wanted to pray away the RH Bill, women have found and bought bottles labelled pamparegla (to force menstruation) and pampalaglag (to force an abortion). right there in Quiapo, in front of that beautiful Church, countless Filipino women have gone to pray for forgiveness as they give the tablets and syrups and liquid in bottles a test drive. right there in Quiapo countless women have gone and disappeared for an hour or two or three, to risk their lives on beds and in rooms inhabited by women and girls like them, who don’t know what else to do. some or many of these women die, we don’t know for sure: they fall off the radar as they enter these spaces.

the CBCP prayed in Quiapo today, prayed against the RH Bill, family planning, birth control. prayed against the culture of death. prayed for the culture of life.

and right there in Quiapo, the travesty of the Pinoy Church could only be clearer than the bottles of pampalaglag that surrounded them. as they insist on valuing life, they have by their own refusal to give women the right to their bodies, been insisting on the culture of death all this time.

komentaryo

the travesty of the Pinoy Church 1

because on the one hand: it will tell its followers abortion is a sin, those women who do it, they are sinners, they are irresponsible. all you, who use contraception, you are committing abortion. you are sinners. you are immoral.

on the other: they will refuse any form of education that has the word sex in it. yes, even when in the same sentence as sex, is the word responsibility. oh no! this Pinoy Church would rather think that every Filipino is a Catholic (#1) and is therefore a follower of all the Church’s rules (#2). that because of these two things, they will not sin, and they will not need to be educated on sex. because they already know the rules of abstinence and the rule of sex only after and within marriage.

this is ideal, yes, but it is unrealistic. and this is at the core of my issues with the Catholic Church, Pinoy-style. it refuses to see anything other than what it wants to see: a bunch of sinners, all of us who don’t follow their rules, who question their insistence on abstinence, who go against what they believe about sex and libog.

common sense tells us this: how do we listen to priests who, as a matter of marrying God, don’t even (shouldn’t!) think about having sex, or libog, or anything related to it. that is of course when they aren’t to throwing a sermon or two — along with some threats! — at their brethren.

and they threaten us all with what? there’s hell, for one thing. and for another, the threat of a civil disobedience campaign, and some good ol’ (but denied on the late night news) excommunication for P-Noy. and every other person who says yes (finally!) to birth control, to couples exercising their right to plan their families, to women deciding on their bodies, because we are the only ones who have the right to it.

any woman who has a sense of the real conditions of women in this country would also know not to fear excommunication, not to fear hell. because in fact, we are already in a worst version of hell here, in this space where we aren’t protected in any way, where that finger of blame is easily and quickly pointed in our direction, where half the time we feel like witches being burned at the stake.

the saddest thing? because we have been told so often that our voices are the bane of the Pinoy Church’s existence, we have started to believe it too, and become uncertain about crucial laws that have yet to be passed, but which are ultimately the things we need. and deserve.

the Reproductive Health Bill is our right as women. as women who admit to having and/or wanting sex (within and outside of marriage), as women who want to keep safe and healthy and productive despite the label of sinner that the Pinoy Church has stamped on our foreheads.

we believe all these and act on it, because truth to tell, we are also women who are about the things that this Pinoy Church teaches us: love and marriage and happy endings. yes, we dream of these things. but we can only be as liberated as our bodies are free. we can only be liberated when we cease to fear our bodies, when we stop thinking that all these things we feel and want to do are scary sinful things.

the travesty that is this Pinoy Church is that as it threatens us with hell, it creates this nation where women are without an RH Bill to protect them, where women die at childbirth and from sexually transmitted diseases, where women’s bodies are unprotected, as are their emotions.

if this isn’t hell, i don’t know what is.

komentaryo

because i vote for:

cheaper safer healthier bras please.

and cheaper, less painful breast exams (please naman, no more scary and expensive old school mammograms)!

here’s my friend Anina, with what is fit for the Breast Cancer Awareness Month that is October.

kultura

would you marry Robin Padilla?

a friend and twitter/facebook contact was asked this today. that he’s a boy apparently didn’t matter. right now of course, what we’re told is this: that what matters is love. Robin and Mariel have fallen in love and have gotten married, and as Tina Monzon-Palma attests, you can see it in their eyes.

and yes, we grant them love. that’s easy enough. do we grant them credibility? that is the question. and this is what the above question’s about.

so would i? marry Robin Padilla, i mean? well, i’d begin my answer with:

(1) that i understand his appeal, this bad boy action star dirty rugged image, the one that just works with his history as a bad boy, and the way his icon has been created/fashioned/rehabilitated/ revived so it may keep at being the quintessential Pinoy macho.

(2) which is connected to this: in the midst of metrosexuality as capital, his value as Pinoy macho has shot through the roof because there really is no one else like him. add to this the fact of a divorce from longterm wife Liezel, and tadah! binata na ulit si Robin. oh, the appeal of that! (yes, i’ve swooned elsewhere.)

but is he marrying material? interesting question. in truth it never seemed like Robin was married. ever. because when we imagine marriage, we imagine it in the sense that the husband doesn’t flirt on nationwide television with the women he’s paired with in movies and on tv. in the sense that he is loyal and a one-woman-man. in the sense that we don’t hear news of him getting it on with other girls while he’s married.

add to all this the layer of celebrity, the kind that has allowed them, the couple and their managers, to have a plan. this might be contrary to their press releases, but really, you can’t tell me that your wedding in India was a surprise even to you both, when all of it (including what I was wearing, nandon! Mariel squealed) is on the next issue of Starstudio Magazine. you cannot say that this is about a love that is private and only yours, when you were prepared for a photoshoot with obviously choreographed and staged poses at the Taj Mahal. i do not doubt that there’s love there, but also there’s celebrity. and there’s capital. there are obviously their careers, now bound together into one career that’s about the two of them.

the lowest point in all this of course, was the media’s bombardment of these images. i don’t care that the showbiz talkshows feature it again and again, or that it’s in the chikaminute segment on Saksi and showbiz news on TV Patrol. but to actually deem it as breaking news? in the midst of everything else that’s of national interest, goodness gracious, why o why?

realize that this isn’t about the public wanting to know about Robin and Mariel. it’s about news and public affairs departments deciding that this is important enough to give to the public right away.

anyone who knows me would know that i am all for love at first sight, for swift courtships and secret marriages. i am all for falling quickly and easily, because that does happen, and sometimes it does work. but to bombard us with this particular love, given the trappings it comes in? and to deem it as important and valuable as the aftermath of the hostage crisis, and P-Noy’s trip to the States.

ah, but undoubtedly the Robin and Mariel story meant ratings. the kind that P-Noy might not be getting? and in which case, good job media practitioner! good job on losing your credibility.

next time i want more relevant news, i’ll watch my showbiz talkshow.

kultura

the Charice challenge is on!

This isn’t so much about Charice Pempengco herself, as it is about an audience in this country that’s overly critical of her by default, that obviously doesn’t care much for her. And it has to be said that it’s class, social and otherwise, that allows for this double standard when it comes to national pride, which disallows Charice from being properly celebrated as a high point in Philippine popular culture history.

Even when she’s had the song “Pyramid” on the Billboard charts for a while now. Behind her she’s got David Foster, American icon, music producer and star, who has put her onstage with international superstars. She has Oprah Winfrey as manager and modern fairy godmother. She’s got Hollywood contracts for singing and acting, has done duets with Celine Dion and Andreas Bocelli, and will be in the second season of Glee.

You’d have to be in denial to think all these to be unimportant; you’d be wrong to think that just because there’s little of Charice on TV and in the papers, she isn’t as big a star as Oprah imagines. Because whether we like it or not, Charice’s international stardom doesn’t seem like a one-time deal. In fact, it looks like she’s in it for the long haul. The world has got Charice Mania to prove it. It’s also a response to you, critical Pinoy non-fan.

via GMANews online, the rest of it is here!