reason is the reason

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.

Great start, Noynoy/Mar, your newly-published platform does a good job at differentiating your style of governance against the incumbent’s. It’s a great platform, if you were running against Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

But as a concrete plan for action, it feels a bit thin. As a way to distinguish yourselves from the other candidates, well, I could easily take the numbered items and slap Manny Villar’s logo on top of it.

I’m sure this will be a recurring problem, not just for you guys, but for the other candidates as well. Because our country’s problems are so obvious, most of the candidates are sure to mention the same issues, and will propose much the same solutions. The real test is in how the platform determines policy on the ground.

My questions immediately after the jump.

Read more…

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…

The Congressional Research Service, a think tank employed by the U.S. Congress, was supposed to make its findings public… but the Internet has beat them to it.

WikiLeaks has made all CRS’ reports public as a whopping 2.2GB download courtesy of PirateBay.

If the thought of downloading a 2.2GB zip file makes you throw up in your mouth a little, WikiLeaks also has the reports in a handy index format that allows you to download the reports as individual PDF files.

Here’s a short list of the files I found the most interesting - I’ve downloaded these and will be doing a lot of really wonky reading for the next few nights. (via Metafilter)

• China’s “Soft Power” in Southeast Asia (RL34310 / 2008-01-04)
• East Asian Regional Architecture: New Economic and Security Arrangements and U.S. Policy (RL33653 / 2008-01-04)
• Terrorism in Southeast Asia (RL34194 / 2007-09-11)
• The Republic of the Philippines: Background and U.S. Relations (RL33233 / 2007-08-10)
• Abu Sayyaf: Target of Philippine-U.S. Anti-Terrorism Cooperation (RL31265 / 2007-07-26)
• U.S. Strategic and Defense Relationships in the Asia-Pacific Region (RL33821 / 2007-01-22)
• China-Southeast Asia Relations: Trends, Issues, and Implications for the United States (RL32688 / 2006-04-04)
• U.S. Military Operations in the Global War on Terrorism: Afghanistan, Africa, the Philippines, and Colombia (RL32758 / 2006-01-20)
• The Asian Development Bank (RS21437 / 2005-03-14)
• Islam in South and Southeast Asia (RS21903 / 2005-02-08)
• PHILIPPINE-U.S. SECURITY RELATIONS (RS20697 / 2000-10-10)

Apropos of the EDSA anniversary we’re “celebrating” this week, this comment in Metafilter seems to address our country’s main quandary even if it has nothing to do with us in the first place.

This is actually something I’ve been mulling over recently - the way in which, during the twentieth century, much of the ruling class of the West (including many monarchs) had to confront the idea that it is better to have less power within a stable system than more power in a system you might be tossed out of at any time. I think you saw a similar thing after the Napoleonic period, especially in the run-up to the 1848 revolutions - the idea that the choice is not between being an absolute monarch or a constitutional one, but between being a constitutional monarch and being thrown out by some populist movement (right-wing or left).

To speak of Sihanouk, he had the experience of being driven from power first by the French and then later by a popular revolution when he tried to take too much power. The only way to preserve his power was to tie himself to the people, to become a quasi-benevolent “King-Father” (wikipedia rendition of his title) and constitutional monarch. In an age of turmoil and dictatorship, those who represent stable power, supported more by authority than violence, have an interest in allying with democratic forces which are interested in stability against those who want to dominate through violence, and the smarter ones understand this.