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President Gloria Arroyo is not a moral person, judging from her amoral handling of the “Hello, Garci” scandal and the ZTE broadband contract scandal. Her support for the Catholic bishops’ anachronistic position on birth control is not based on moral reasons; more likely, it is based on calculations of political expediency: she intends to use the Catholic bishops to generate support for her political moves in the next two years.
Such as, for example, the caving in of her government to the demands of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), that their ancestral domain be expanded to include 712 additional barangays over and above the existing Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao. She knows that this would be widely unpopular among the Christian majority, including the Christians in the affected areas who face the prospect of living under the Sharia Law in what is to be known as the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity (BJE), eventually to become the Bangsamoro Federal State. She is apparently banking on the Catholic bishops to support her on this in the coming plebiscite/s to formalize her surrender to the MILF.
For the BJE to become a federal state, there must first be Charter Change to move to federalism, almost certainly in 2009. By the strangest coincidence, Sen. Aquilino Pimentel’s Senate Resolution No. 10 seeks to move to federalism through a plebiscite before the end of President Arroyo’s term on June 30, 2010. And Pimentel wants this shift to be engineered through a constituent assembly, in which the Kampi/Lakas juggernaut would totally overwhelm the oppositionist Senate. In the meantime, Albay Gov. Joey Salceda is pushing for a parallel switch to the parliamentary form of government. Salceda and Pimentel will have to disprove that they are not part of the maneuver of President Arroyo and Kampi to keep her in power beyond 2010.
As for the Philippine Catholic bishops, my sense is that they will support President Arroyo’s maneuvers, as long as she supports their inflexible stance against artificial methods of birth control, even at the risk of allowing some of the faithful to fall under the Sharia Law. Like the Catholic Church, Islam rejects artificial methods of birth control and sees them as part of the secularism that eroded Christianity in Europe, the Anglo-Saxon countries and major parts of Latin America, which the imams do not want to see happening in their own domains.
On this point, therefore, the Philippine Catholic bishops are Soul Brothers with Muslim imams. The bishops, most of whom have presumably never put on a condom in their entire lives, see the condom as the Evil Incarnate, more so because it is experientially unknown to most of them.
Nothing is more threatening than an Unknown Evil. Hence, condoms are more unacceptable than some of the faithful falling under Sharia Law or President Arroyo staying in power beyond 2010. — Antonio C. Abaya, www.tapatt.org
