reason is the reason

The recent bus hijacking in Manila once again placed the Philippines under an unpleasant media spotlight this week, with the BBC and CNN rightfully decrying the incompetence of the local authorities. Eight tourists died at the end of the bus hijacking, mostly due to the Manila police’s self-admitted "inadequate capability, skills, equipment and planning.”

As a travel writer living in Manila, I’m of two minds on the matter. I grieve along with other Manila residents, as these were eight tourist deaths in our backyard that should never have happened. On the other hand… “Philippines disaster” seems to be the default setting for any news coverage of this part of the world.

It’s not entirely undeserved. Filipinos have long suffered under years of corrupt government and backward theocracy, with no end in sight. Official responses to major disasters vary from the barely viable to the outright incompetent, with this week’s police failure being very much the latter. (I had to check a few times if Frank Drebin had been inexplicably put in charge of the Manila SWAT team.)

Yet this reflects unfairly on the parts of the Philippines that are, in not so many words, awesome.

Read more…

Many Catholics say that they stay in the Roman Catholic Church because it provides a moral compass: in many doubtful circumstances, the Church is best able to tell right from wrong.

Catholics with a more fully developed moral compass may want to reassess the situation - just ask ABS-CBN’s Ricky Carandang:

This afternoon I interiewed Fr. Melvin Castro, who heads the CBCP commission that drafted the [voting] guidelines and asked him why candidates who commit plunder and acts of corruption are not being condemned in the same way that reproductive health advocates are.
Castro said in effect that plunder and all of those corrupt acts are an offshoot of the lack of respect for the family and therefore not as bad in the heirarchy of catholic morality as family planning which is as he says, anti-family.

Flabbergasted, I asked if they were saying it was alright to vote for a crook as long as he doesn’t advocate modern family planning. His roundabout answer,—as I understand it is …in so many words – yes.

With the caveat that a) this is Carandang’s spin on Castro’s response, absent a transcript, and b) the blithely-dismissed “roundabout answer” may actually make sense, if we knew what it said… assuming it’s true, the CBCP demolishes its own moral authority with Castro’s answer. At the very least, we’d question Castro’s ability to make a moral judgment.

But that’s the minefield the Church has put itself into, through its own actions. The Church hierarchy currently puts an abnormally high priority on its anti-contraception policy. The price it pays for its single-mindedness is this: an absurd taxonomy of acceptable candidates prioritizes thieves and liars for public office over (gasp!) men who advocate pills and condoms!

How can we trust a self-proclaimed “moral authority” that bends morality to suit its political needs of the moment? Where is the moral superiority of overlooking minor issues like corruption for any given candidate, so long said candidate is against spending public money on birth control?

Actually, I’d like to throw the question back to Ricky Carandang and his friends in the so-called media - you know that relativists like Melvin Castro are just as morally questionable as the typical politician. So when does the Catholic Church stop getting a free pass in media coverage? When will the media stop treating moral failures like Melvin Castro and the CBCP with kid gloves?

Update: Melvin Castro answered Ricky Carandang on the comments section, and his “clarification” does a wonderful job of explaining what he thinks, although not in the way that he’d like.

A true Pro-family and pro-life candidate would also be anti-corruption and pro-environment candidate. And in our contention nothing could be more corrupt than one who corrupts and undermines Family and Life values.

Seriously, that’s how Castro answers the question: pro-RH candidates are by definition corrupt. Ergo, no contradiction, since the definition of “corruption” has been arbitrarily changed to include pro-RH candidates! Dishonest arguing, but I’m not really surprised; this is what passes for a logical argument in Church circles these days.

The final chapter of John Shelby Spong’s book Born of a Woman discusses how the developing concept of the “purity of Mary” has influenced the state of women from the birth of Christianity the present day.

Mary, Spong argues, embodies a male-created ideal of submissiveness (much alive in the Catholic church) that Corazon Aquino typifies - an image that stands in opposition to Reformation-born example of female power, Margaret Thatcher. The rest is a direct quote from pp. 220-221 of Born of a Woman:

The emancipation of women has come primarily in those parts of the world in which the Protestant Reformation kicked over the sexual stereotypes of both virgin Mary and Mother Church. Corazon Aquino was one of the rare women in the twentieth century to achieve political power in a predominantly Roman Catholic country, and she had three things going for her that made her situation unique. She was the widow of the primary political rival to Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Her husband was in fact murdered by Marcos, and therefore she became his political and spiritual heir. She was backed by James (sic) Cardinal Sin, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines. Finally, she had the backing of key military generals. Without all three of those sources of male power she could not have achieved her position. Indeed, her public demeanor of simple piety, obedience to the church and military, and the absence of personal political ambitions made her a “safe” female candidate, a symbol easily controlled behind the scenes by powerful males. Her hold on political power was always tenuous and rested upon the willingness of the background male figures to continue to offer support. Compare that to the figure of Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” of Protestant England’s politics in the 1980s, who ruled, won elections, and scuttled her enemies in her own name and with her own power. She even appointed the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London and bent the Church of England to her own political purposes.

Corazon Aquino and Margaret Thatcher reveal vastly different definitions of what it means to be a woman. Those definitions, I argue, rise out of the still-alive denigration of women that marked traditional Christianity in the case of Mrs. Aquino and a rebellion against that traditional Christian definition of women that was part of the Reformation, which produced Mrs. Thatcher. My point is that beginning with the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke and carrying on through the rise of Mary as a figure in Christian theology, we are not dealing with the image of a real woman in Christian history. Mary is a male-created female figure who embodies the kind of woman dominant males think is ideal - docile, obedient, powerless. (emphasis mine)

Take note that this was written in 1992, long before Gloria became President. Spong’s analysis might also apply to Gloria; her positions vis-a-vis the church and the military prove Spong’s point (in my opinion) rather than refute it.

Political marriages in the Philippines tend to end well for the marriage-makers, but poorly for the country at large.

When Ferdinand Marcos shrewdly married a pliant beauty queen to bolster his run for the presidency, nobody suspected that she harbored a burning ambition of her own beneath those pretty butterfly dresses. Read more…

Suzette Nicolas is not a “victim”. Can we finally stop pretending that she is?

Suzette Nicolas is not a “victim”. Let’s get this straight. She didn’t get played, she played us.

Suzette Nicolas is not a “victim”. Sure, she was weepy and vengeful when she needed the support of Gabriela, pandering politicians, and the ever-pliant blogosphere, and now that she’s safely in the U.S., she drops the bombshell on us, “hey, you know what, maybe it didn’t happen the way I said it did.”

And YET the “v-word” still gets slung about out of force of habit. The media still pussyfoots about Nicolas, continuing to call her “Nicole” as if she’s still a personality worth protecting.

Everybody is busy blaming everybody else but Suzette Nicolas herself.

In fact, it seems like everybody’s bending over backwards to shield Nicolas from any responsibility in the matter! I don’t understand the need for her absolution: after all, it was her word against Smith’s that she was raped, her cause that the Left rallied about, her case that politicians used as a bargaining chip against a foreign power.

(The same foreign power, need I add, to whom Nicolas ran for protection after giving a legalistic middle finger to her former supporters!) Read more…

Having her baptized was really not my idea. I was fine with having Andie go “infidel” all the way, a privilege I never got to have. But we knew that leaving her unbaptized would mean Chinese water torture from both sets of grandmothers, who would not rest until the Catholic Church had her soul in its clutches.
Read more…