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.

Alleged Road-rage killer Jason Ivler, it seems, was not in Hawaii (as per his nutso mom Marlene Aguilar); not in Colombia (as per some of his advocates on my comments section).

Apparently Jason Ivler was in Blue Ridge, Quezon City all along, in his mom’s rented home, whose walls were thankfully no hindrance to a dedicated NBI team armed with ladders and the threat of deadly force.

Jason Ivler returned fire with a “baby Armalite” (a short-barrelled CAR-15 rifle), but got shot by the NBI when they returned fire. (I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to see him on TV, groaning in agony while the NBI put him under arrest.) They found a .45 pistol with him, which will be tested to see if it’s the same gun used to kill Victor Ebarle Jr.

I checked with my contact in ADB (the same contact who forwarded me the “open letter” Mrs. Aguilar sent over the ADB listserv when her son was first arrested) about the hapless Stephen Pollard, stepfather of the alleged murderer Jason Ivler. Pollard was married to another British citizen at the time he first joined ADB, but later divorced her and married Aguilar.

My bubwit says that there was some talk about persuading Pollard to resign - he can’t be fired for his stepson’s supposed crimes - or at least assigning him to Afghanistan where his family situation could do the least damage to ADB’s reputation. At least, my bubwit says, ADB immunity only covers acts committed while performing ADB duties; Pollard sheltering his no-good stepson does not apply. Conspiracy theories aside, Stephen Pollard will probably not be able to benefit from any immunity in this case.

(Also, let’s get this straight - Pollard is not a diplomat. He’s an economist who enjoys a diluted form of diplomatic immunity. But enjoying diplomatic immunity does not make one a diplomat!)

What now for Jason Ivler? Nothing too bad can happen to him or his mom; nobody I know has much sympathy for this cold-blooded moron and his Mommy MacBeth. I’m hoping rough, unlubricated, unwelcome butt-sex with a Bilibid prisoner called “Boy Tulis” is in his future, that’s if his “Special Forces” buddies don’t break him out of prison in a bad imitation of every Cannon Films movie from the 80s. Welcome to the Philippine prison system, pretty boy, hope you brought KY Jelly.

I love the premise of this web-based comedy sketch: Henry VIII is alive and well, living in suburbia with his long-suffering wife Catherine Parr, and seriously addicted to the Internet. Why are they stealing scenes from my life now?!

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…