It is almost predictable that when the time comes for President Arroyo's State of the Nation address before a joint session of Congress, the usual suspects will claim that they, not she, know the real state of the nation.
It is almost ritualistic that so-called leftist activists will mass on the roads leading to the Batasan to drive home the point that more and more Filipinos are living below the poverty line, and that more and more of us are experiencing involuntary hunger more often than before, and that President Arroyo should step down from power.
And there are the gentlemen and ladies of the Opposition who have pointedly refused to attend the joint session as a gesture of rebuke to President Arroyo.
Being neither a leftist activist nor an Opposition figure, I preferred to sit through her speech and hear her out, in the comfort and privacy of my bedroom.
But I fell asleep. And when I woke up, there was a naked man on the TV screen, which momentarily made me wonder if the channel had switched to a porno flick.
But I had a transcript of her speech, which I dutifully read through, just to find out what she said or was trying to say.
My first reaction was: President Arroyo needs a better wordsmith, someone of the caliber of Teddyboy Locsin, who can inject some substance and some unifying cohesion to her disjointed words and thoughts.
I cannot accept that what she read was the 20th revision of the speech, as Malacanang would have us believe.. It sounded more like what the first draft must have sounded: bits and pieces from different agencies thrown into the bowl, mixed with some spicy theatrics (such as the naked man), and stirred with some oily substance being passed off as her motherly concern for the poor.
As far as I was concerned, three main positions emerged from her SONA. One, that she steadfastly stands by the conservative position of the Philippine Roman Catholic bishops, that only natural methods of birth control are acceptable. Two, she has given in to the demands of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) for an expanded autonomous region as their ancestral domain. And three, her solution to the global problem of high oil prices and high food prices is to give cash subsidies to the poorest of the poor.
In my opinion, these three main positions are interconnected.
In my article Lucky and Amoral? (July 16, 2008), I posited that President Arroyo is not a moral person, judging from her amoral handling of the Hello Garci tape scandal and the ZTE broadband contract scandal. Her support for the Catholic bishops' anachronistic position on birth control is, therefore, 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 MILF, that their ancestral domain be expanded to include 712 additional barangays over and above the existing Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).
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 Sharia law in the MILF's ancestral domain to be known as the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity, 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 Bangsamoro Juridical Entity to become the Bangsamoro Federal State, there must first be Charter Change to move to federalism, almost certainly in 2009. By the strangest coincidence, Sen. Nene 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 Sen. 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.
Gov. Salceda and Sen. 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. And the only way for them to do that would be to publicly stop their respective advocacies and postpone them until after 2010.
If they are not willing to do that, for whatever reason, then public perception would remain, that they are, in the language of American football, running interference for her so that she can score a touchdown.
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 Sharia law.
Like the Catholic Church, Islam rejects artificial methods of birth control and sees them as part of the secularism that has 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, 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. It is a choice of what they think are the lesser evils.
THAT ISLAM REJECTS artificial methods of birth control is evident in the population growth rates of most predominantly Muslim countries, as per the following data from the 2008 World Almanac and Book of Facts:
Yemen (3.46%), Mali (3.30), Oman (3.20), Mauritania (2.87), Saudi Arabia (2.66), Afghanistan (2.63), Iraq (2.62), Nigeria (2.35), Libya (2.26), Syria (2.25), Bangladesh (2.12), Sudan (2.05), Tajikistan (2.03), Pakistan (1.95), the Philippines (1.91), Jordan (1.80), Malaysia (1.76), Egypt (1.74), Indonesia (1.34), Iran (1.09), and Turkey (1.04). *****
No comments:
Post a Comment