The war continues

In the parish where I grew up in Quezon City, the latest scandal involves one of the local clerics making a choir member pregnant. The matter has been complicated by the fact that the young woman also has a boyfriend who is not a member of the clergy and who has since been threatening to unmask the priest as the sexual predator that he really is.

If only the priest had used a condom, the local wags say. But then, the punch line goes, that would have gone against the doctrine of the Church prohibiting the use of contraceptives.

Thank God (or Allah, in his case) Robin Padilla, the high-profile endorser of one condom manufacturer, is not a Catholic but a Muslim. That puts him beyond the reach of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, which has called for a ban on all advertising for prophylactics in the entire country, on the grounds that the ads imperil the youth and family life.

“Condom advertisements should be banned in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines and public places, as they desensitize the youth’s delicate conscience and weaken their moral fiber as future parents,” CBCP president Nereo Odchimar said in a statement on the bishops’ Web site. The packages of condoms themselves, Odchimar said, should carry warning labels that they may fail to protect from AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The bishops’ demand for an advertising ban on condoms is the just the latest salvo from the Catholic hierarchy in the long-running battle being waged on contraception in this nominally Catholic country. But just how advertising for contraceptive devices like condoms that the government itself wants to use to combat a growing AIDS epidemic can be banned from mostly private media seems problematic.

For starters, a truly secular state that recognizes religious plurality and declares a separate identity and existence from religion, including the most dominant one, cannot take orders from leaders of one faith based solely on the moral doctrines espoused by the latter. That would put us in the category of Iran and other such theocratic states, or send us back to the Spanish colonial period where the friars imposed their doctrines and their will on a weak secular leadership.

And then, there’s the small matter of ensuring public health, which any self-respecting government must see to over the objections of religious leaders, regardless of their influence. Public policy, especially public health policy, cannot be held hostage by religious or cultural beliefs; if that were the case, then the government might as well allow female genital mutilation or any other such barbaric and unhealthy practice that can be justified on the basis of one’s religious faith or cultural tradition.

But this is only another skirmish in the bigger war between Church and State over government-sponsored contraception, after all. As far as the Church is concerned, condom advertising is part of a grand scheme to control the population; the State, on the other hand, could very well be allowing condoms to be openly sold and promoted to gain a new foothold in its overall strategy to introduce programs to slow down population growth.

And where does that leave us, who are both citizens and members of one or some other faith? It leaves us with the choice of how to act as individuals who are responsible for our actions, simply because we (not the Church nor the State) will have to live with the consequences.

Just like that priest in my old neighborhood will have to live with the consequences of what he did to that young woman.

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Earlier, of course, the bishops demanded the head of the new secretary of the Department of Health for distributing free condoms on Valentine’s Day as part of its campaign to increase awareness about the worsening AIDS epidemic in the Philippines. It was not known if the health department gave away some of the condoms to clerics who may have needed them on the day when motels and other trysting places rack up their biggest sales.

Secretary Esperanza Cabral was unrepentant. “While it is very important for us to find out what [the bishops] think, to cooperate with them in areas where we can be cooperating, the government must do what it thinks is right for everybody. Not everybody in the Philippines belongs to one church.”

Cabral’s department has recorded a total of 4,424 HIV/AIDS cases since 1984, when the government started monitoring the disease, to December 2009. Last year, the government discovered 835 new cases of AIDS and last January, the number of new HIV cases reached an all-time high of 143.

As to the bishops’ contention that the taxes paid by Catholics who are against contraception are being used to fund something they object to on religious grounds, Cabral has a good answer to that, as well. The secretary pointed out that Congress (which is notoriously afraid of the Church hierarchy) did not appropriate any funds for the procurement of condoms in the department’s budget.

Cabral noted that Congress seems to have officially taken the position that the HIV-AIDS problem does not exist. The epidemic is “not recognized [by both policy-makers and legislators],” she said.

This is the same Congress, after all, that cannot pass the reproductive health bill despite survey after survey clearly indicating that most Filipinos support government-aided programs to curb population growth. And so, in the absence of locally-sourced funds, the health department has decided to use funds provided by international agencies such as those offered by the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

GFATM sources its funds from philanthropists such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, according to Cabral. The fund has set aside $215 million for the Philippines over a period of several years, she said, including about $85 million to help stop AIDS.

The government’s purchase of condoms is part of its commitment in exchange for accepting these funds. “So our government actually signed and committed to this thing because we accepted [the money],” she said.

Of course, now that it knows that no Catholic’s taxes are being used by the government to buy the condoms that it distributes, the Church may change its strategy and cry foreign intervention in local health policy. But that would sound hypocritical to people who know that a major portion of the local Church’s income doesn’t really go to Catholic charities in the Philippines but is instead remitted to the Vatican’s coffers in Rome.

Still, we must be thankful for the help we can get to help fight AIDS from other countries, especially since our own legislators continue to pretend that the disease hasn’t even reached our shores. And that there are still people in government like Cabral who will do their jobs even if the leadership of the Catholic Church has already consigned them to hell. –Jojo Robles, Manila Standard Today