The Role of Parliamentarians in Achieving UN MDGs and Peace Building in Asia

*** note from blog administrator: the author of this blog was invited to speak at a leadership conference in bangkok, thailand less than a week ago. posted below is his address at the conference.

      

 The Role of Parliamentarians in Achieving UN MDGs

and Peace Building in Asia

 

Francisco S. Tatad

Former Senator, Republic of the Philippines

 

Delivered before the First Asian Parliamentarian Leadership Conference on Peace, Emerald Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand, Oct. 9, 2009

 

My assigned task in this conference is to examine the role of parliamentarians in achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Peace Building in Asia.  The two objectives are inter-related, for indeed the other name of development is peace; without peace there can be no true human development.  

 

At the 2000 Millennium Summit, the international community agreed to eight MDGs----  1) eradicate extreme poverty and hunger;. 2) achieve universal primary education;. 3) promote gender equality; 4) reduce child mortality; 5) improve maternal health;. 6) combat malaria; 7) ensure environmental sustainability; 8) develop a global partnership for development. 

 

These were reaffirmed at the 2005 World Summit. 

 

Not a single one of these goals is new.  They are as old as the liberal democratic state. What is new is the firm resolve to mobilize  every moral resolve and every material resource to turn back, if not altogether end, human poverty and inequality within the lifetime of this generation.  

 

It is an extremely ambitious project. A casual look at the landscape, however, provides us little reason to hope that we would  exceed our targets by the year 2015.   The record of the 111^th Congress of the United States alone shows that  from the beginning of this year until the first part of  September , only one bill---the Serve America Act---has passed both Houses of Congress, out of a total of 37 MDG-related measures filed.  What about our own parliaments and  congresses?

 

They will have to  enact all the MDG-related programs and policies.  But hand in hand with that, they will have to make sure that those programs and policies put man and his love of truth, freedom, justice and peace at the center, not at the far fringe, of all development.  For there is a great worldly temptation to regard all development associated with technological progress as the pure triumph of  man’s genius alone.  This tends to  unhinge many of us  from our First and Last End, instead reconnecting us ever more firmly to our natural origin and our supernatural end, to the source of all knowledge, all wisdom and all inventions, to Him who, as Benedict XVI reminds us in Caritas In Veritate, commanded man at the dawn of  creation  to do technology----to till and keep the land.

 

Even peace, the Pope reminds us, now runs the risk of being considered a technical product,  the mere outcome of technical agreements that calculate mutual self-interest and self-advantages rather than the outpouring of truth and justice based on our respect and love for one another  as children of the same God.

 

Poor countries, hobbled by their chronic inadequacy of resources, exacerbated by the global economic downturn,  not to mention the unmitigated impact  of political corruption, natural calamities and man-made disasters, as in the mega floods that recently hit Metro Manila and environs and have just returned to northern Luzon even as we speak, could find themselves demoralized by their lack of deployable resources and technological progress and may seek to procure both by putting their deepest moral, cultural and religious values at risk.

 

Parliamentarians must assert their moral and political ascendancy  and point out that that is always an unfair and onerous exchange, a swindle if ever there was one, where the human being loses everything and gains nothing. Man is both matter and spirit; he is not to be split between the two parts so that one part may be sacrificed for the other. The development of peoples, as Benedict’s Caritas points out, is not merely a technical matter.  It is not simply a matter of financial engineering, the freeing up of markets, the removal of tariffs, investment in production, and institutional reforms. Development includes the ethical building up and nurturing of upright men and women who should be at the frontline in our  effort to serve the common good. 

 

The MDGs, properly interpreted and pursued, could raise  our peoples to new heights.  But they could also be corrupted,  perverted and misused for certain ideological or political ends and end up with toxic and harmful results. We need only look at what’s happening with MDG 5---namely, to improve maternal health----to see what I mean.

 

At the surface there is  nothing controversial about  it.   Mothers have long deserved it.  They need not die during pregnancy or childbirth. They also need not die when they are not pregnant or giving birth. But far more women die  from the major diseases than from anything associated with pregnancy or childbirth.   Nonetheless the MDGs do not seem terribly concerned about this. Rather they seem totally committed to MDG 5 to the exclusion of the major women killers, even though the problem could be competently addressed by providing adequate, basic obstetrics services without neglecting the more deadly diseases.

 

It appears that one agenda riding on  MDG 5 not necessarily seeks to save mothers from death or disease, although that is not an unwelcome consequence, but rather seeks to save women from becoming mothers. Abortion appears to have become the foremost prescription against maternal death. This is promoted by international civil servants at the UN who claim that international law has made abortion a basic woman’s right. This is unhappily boosted by US President Barack Obama’s order authorizing the use of US funds to support abortion in developing countries, and by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s statement to  the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives that reproductive health includes access to abortion and that the US is resolved to remove all obstacles to such access. 

 

Parliamentarians everywhere must find the courage to say this is wrong. No global UN treaty contains the word “abortion.” Therefore no right to abortion may be inferred from any such document. They must now call upon the UN to adhere strictly to the true spirit of the MDGS and the letter and spirit of its treaties. They must find the courage to tell the UN that the best way to achieve MDG 5 is to put in adequate and competent obstetrics care, just as fastest way to achieve MDG 4, reduce child mortality, is to outlaw and penalize abortion in the same manner that the law of nations outlaws and punishes genocide.    

 

Parliamentarians everywhere must now stand together in defense of the most helpless and the most innocent who are destroyed routinely by unjust laws.  In every single one of those lives we see a unique and incomparable gift that can only come from God.   No one has a right to destroy it, or even knock it.  In every other kind of gift-giving, the recipient must first exist in order to receive the gift from the giver.  In the gift of life, however, the gift, which is life, creates the one who receives it; in the process the recipient becomes the gift himself.

 

We must read our commitment to the MDGs or to any political, economic or social program within the framework of this profound mystery, no less than our own respective constitutions and cultures. Only then will the MDGs rise to the true meaning of development.

 

All over Asia today there persist conflicts internal to certain countries or affecting neighbors bound by common borders. They have long defied an easy solution. They demand a new vision of peace which the contending parties should be able to share. Where governments remain in stalemate, parliamentarians, businessmen, civic leaders, humanitarian peace workers and plain citizens could begin building human bridges that communicate solidarity, self-giving and goodwill without attempting to play on the weakness of others.

 

But over and above all these conflicts that disfigure relations among peoples and nations, there is one conflict that precedes all, one that cries to the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of all men for a permanent solution. It is the conflict between the forces of life and light and the forces of death and darkness----the conflict between the life-forbidders and the unborn. 

 

There must be peace, not enmity, between those who exercise power over others and those who lie powerless inside their mother’s womb. If there is to be peace anywhere at all, it must begin with the closest neighbors. And none could be closer than the fetus and its mother. The killing of those helpless innocents must stop, and we stand a good chance of making it happen if we could but make the world see that human life is not a piece of private property where we who sit inside could keep everyone else out. 

 

A new vision of peace should allow us not only to look at all men as brothers but above all to look at each one as his brother’s keeper. Their being brothers did not prevent Cain from slaying Abel, as Scripture tells us, but would he have committed the same vile murder  had he known, had he believed, that he was his brother’s keeper?  I wonder.

 

The work of peace, the gift of peace, needs men and women who cannot look at the face of their enemy, if any human being may yet be so described, without seeing themselves  or the face of their own Maker.  The formula is not new. It is as old as the Gospel,  yet as  the Gospel new. It is a solution waiting for courageous souls to make it happen.

 

Will it work? History provides the answer.

 

At the Nobel Peace Prize awarding ceremonies in Oslo in 1993, two men who had fought each other all their adult lives stood side by side to receive the world’s applause after they had embraced in peace. From the lips of Nelson Mandela came these words:

 

“He (referring to his old archenemy, South African president Frederik Willem de Klerk) had the courage to admit that a terrible wrong had been done to our country and people through the imposition of apartheid. He had the foresight to understand and accept that all the people of South Africa must, through negotiations and as equal participants in the process, together determine what they want to make of the future.”

 

And from the lips of de Klerk we heard:

 

“We needed a fundamental change---a change of heart on both sides. It was not a sudden change, but a process---a process of introspection, of soul-searching, of repentance, of realization of the futility of ongoing conflict, of acknowledgment of failed policies and the injustice it brought with it.”

 

A couple of years ago  I sat with President de Klerk at a conference in Doha and listened to him put it even more simply than he did to his Nobel Peace Prize audience.  Asked how he finally decided to end apartheid, he said, “All I had to do was put myself in the shoes of the other fellows and ask myself why they wanted what they wanted.” That did it.

 

Let me end with something woven from ancient lore.  It is told that one day Patanjali and Lo Tzu were walking in the forest when the river began to rise.  Not wanting to get wet, Patanjali began  to walk on the water. But Lao Tzu pulled him back.  “No need to cross,” he said. “This side is also the  other.”

 

 A new vision for peace, I believe, must help us see this side is also the other.  Thank you very much.

REPOST: The Role of Church and State in Stabilizing Families

Note from Blog Admin:

The first post of the speech below was faulty, and so we're doing it over. Here is the speech delivered by Sen. Tatad at the World Congress of Families in Amsterdam last August.

WORLD CONGRESS OF FAMILIES
Amsterdam, 11 August 2009

Strengthening families in situations of poverty

The Role of Church and State in Stabilizing Families
By Senator Francisco S. Tatad

It has never been easy to be poor, lesser still to be a poor family in a poor-country setting. Millions of families share that situation around the world today. Poverty is the first and most compelling reality they must contend with every single day. It begins with their most basic needs---food, clothing, shelter, education, health care; the failure to meet those needs could tear the marriage apart, expose the poorer spouse to greater financial stress and emotional burden, the children to all forms of privation and insecurity, to vagrancy, pornography, prostitution, drugs and other addictions, and make everyone lose their faith in God and everybody else.

In my country, the state tries to address this problem through various anti-poverty measures, basic education and skills training, job creation, micro-finance, socialized housing, health outreach programs, emergency relief services, and peace initiatives in conflict areas. The Church on the other hand tries to mitigate it through its own regular feeding and disaster relief programs, initiatives in education, character and skills formation, and leadership training especially for the youth and women; livelihood in agriculture and small enterprise; health care especially for the poorest families; policy setting for social legislation and relevant programs; peace and justice in conflict areas; and human development where greater access is needed. It is not uncommon for church and state personnel to work hand in hand to deliver services. Where the work of the Church tends to have a much greater impact on the personal lives of families, the government tries to course some of its activities through church volunteer workers. Although the instability of families usually stems directly from poverty, the task of stimulating them to lead more stable lives often involves much more than ministering to their material needs.

In many instances, poverty could serve as the very glue to keep the family together. It could act as the strong wind, as the good rabbi said here yesterday, that compels the poor family to button up its coat against the bitter cold. It takes a lot of mutual sacrifice and self-giving to face up to problems that never go away, and use them as a means to bring the family closer together. But such heroism is not rare, especially among the poor who hold their commitment to their family as something never to be broken. I have seen this at work in my own home and in so many other homes in my own country.

In recent years, extreme poverty and the desire for a better life have forced millions of Filipinos to leave their homes in search of jobs in foreign countries. The inevitable separation of spouses has many times led to marital infidelities on the part of one spouse or both that ultimately broke the marriage. The Church’s constant effort to provide moral encouragement and spiritual help has saved and continues to save many troubled families.

Through spiritual counseling and healing, frequent confession and reception of the Eucharist, the support of Bible-study and prayer groups and other supernatural aids, many families have survived the threats to their family life. Left to purely natural and human means, the threatened family simply disintegrated.

The importance of being spiritually connected cannot be overstated. A family that frames its daily struggle purely in economic or material terms is likely to crumble as soon as the going gets rough. Marriages that survive the prolonged separation of the spouses or any kind of trial at all are usually those in which the spouses, helped by the Church, retain their hope in God, and know what the Pope means when he says “man is not a lost atom in a random universe.” [1]

I use the term Church being Catholic, to stay on familiar ground. Otherwise, in an ecumenical world of many confessions, where one speaks of many religions but one covenant, church here would mean synagogue, temple and mosque for others. Each of these institutions has to accompany every marriage and every family with their prayers and counsel in everyday life. They have to be open to them, draw them in, so that no family ever stands alone to face the torments of the modern world.

The family, which is the basic unit of society, is not only the first school of life and love but also the first domestic church. It does not stand alone. It is part of a much larger whole, Christ’s Church, properly understood, which has always engaged the world on questions of human dignity and every other fundamental question.

We have seen how poverty in the poor countries, no different than that in rich countries, exerts such pressures on family life. Poor families need no further aggravation from any source. Nevertheless since the last century, a recurring Malthusian fear of the world not having enough to eat and a not so muted eugenicist fear of the “socially unfit” swarming over the planet have fueled various forms of external interventions in the otherwise sacred and inviolate precincts of the family, most aggressively in poor countries.

A well-funded global campaign to change the parameters of human sexuality, marriage, the family, and the very nature of man himself has targeted families everywhere, and this has not been easy to resist. Especially because presented as a great social good, indispensable to social progress.

The announced aim is to liberate the poor, especially women and their families. But women have since been reduced into sex objects and the family deconstructed to accommodate divorce, same-sex union, civil partnership, contraception, sterilization, abortion, euthanasia, and everything else that prevents any unwelcome entrant into the world of the living where some had put up the old sign, “Verboten” or “Verboden” or “Off-limits.”

Situations of poverty, hunger, poor education and inadequate health care have become the ready-made excuse for powerful governments, multilateral institutions and nongovernmental organizations to introduce measures whose manifest resolve, regardless of their announced intent, is simply to bring down the size of the family and the national birth rate and nothing much else.

Some are hoping that because the world financial crisis has put a strain on the resources of many governments, this effort would now slow down. There should be more pressing priorities. That notwithstanding, it could in fact still intensify, because of US President Obama’s order lifting the restriction imposed by President Reagan in 1984 on the use of American funds to support abortion and related activities in the developing world.

There is no reason why poor families in the poor countries should continue to absorb this assault. After all, all predictions of great famines wiping out millions of earthlings before the end of the last century had failed. Birth and fertility rates in the most advanced countries have fallen, and their abortion and other anti-family laws have created nothing but broken homes, drunken divorcees, fatherless children, pregnant teenagers, teenage abortions, teenage suicides, and an infirm and aging population with little prospect of being replaced. All moral and ethical values have broken down, and the post-modern world has sunk into a deep moral relativism where every truth is lost and doubt alone exists----especially on the most fundamental questions.

These should have sufficed to bury this tragic folly. But old habits die hard, so the same disastrous policies and programs are recycled over and over, regardless of the harm they do to poor families everywhere. This is what is happening in my poor heroic country, the Philippines.

The Philippines is a country of 90 million, growing at an annual rate of 2.04%, with a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 3.02, according to its National Statistics Office. (The CIA World Factbook, 2008, however, quotes the birth rate at 1.72%, the TFR at 3.00.) In 1974, we were one of 13 developing countries whose combined population growth inspired the U.S. government, through its National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200, to proclaim a world population plan that called for, among other things, a two-child family everywhere by the year 2000.[2]

Today our birth and fertility rates are down. The large families are gone; the average family size now is five, two parents and three children, and getting smaller still. About 12 million Filipinos live and work abroad; a million more migrate each year. The average Filipino worker is 23 years old, neither too young nor too old. A healthy and dynamic population. No cause for alarm.

Alarm, if at all, should come from those who fear that our fertility rate is already so dangerously close to the replacement level. Last month, the biggest explosion heard in Seoul, Korea was a report saying that by year 2050 Korea would become the most aged society in the OECD with 38.2% of its population----or four out of every 10 Koreans----being 65 years old or over due to its low birth rates and its rapidly aging population. This prompted the head of the Planned Population Federation of Korea urgently to appeal to all Korean women to beget more children---the exact opposite of what he had been telling them for years.

At no time has it become so clear to everyone that people are indeed every nation’s first and ultimate resource. Julian Simon said it before, but populous India, with its 1.3 billion people, has produced a new expert witness for our times. In his book, Imagining India, Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys, a global leader in information technology, proclaims authoritatively that India owes its booming economy today to its teeming millions of entrepreneurs and workers. A fitting reproach to those who had previously written off India as a basket case because of its outsize population.

But instead of addressing the real problem of falling birthrates and aging population, the culture of death lobby continues to look in the opposite direction. As world markets tumbled and every government worth its salt tried to find a possible way out, we in the Philippines were absorbed in a reproductive health bill that seeks to provide everything proscribed by the Church, local custom, and the Constitution.

The country is predominantly Catholic. Abortion is a crime, divorce, civil partnership, and same sex-union are out, the only marriage we recognize is the sacramental or civil union of one man and one woman, for one lifetime. The State may not get involved in promoting contraception or sterilization, but it will not force Humanae Vitae on ignorant or disobedient churchgoers. No law prohibits contraception or sterilization.

The Constitution recognizes “the sanctity of family life,” vows to “protect and strengthen the family as a basic autonomous social institution “ and to “equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception.” It proclaims marriage as “the foundation of the family,” and the family as “the foundation of the nation.”

There are those who disrespect some of these laws. But on the whole they have served the nation well. They have kept most marriages intact, most of our unmarried young men and women chaste, the two sexes different and distinct from each other. And they have kept the society together despite its various fissures and myriad problems.

Still, the bill’s proponents tried to railroad their measure, cheered on by NGOs, the secular media, foreign-degreed academics, economists and scientists, and full-page newspaper ads paid for by some foreign-funded organization.

Faced with such challenge, the families and family groups in opposition decided to transform the legislative fight into a spiritual battle. They brought the issue to their Bible studies, prayer meetings and to the Bishops, who promptly mobilized their priests and the various lay organizations within their respective dioceses. The Bishops then began individually to engage the legislators, offering them moral and spiritual advice, while simultaneously catechesizing everybody else. Many original supporters of the bill have since withdrawn, and many more are rethinking their position.

The fight in Congress is not yet over, but the fight for the family has gained ground. In church, the masses are always full, more and more people are seeking spiritual direction, the lines to the confessional are getting longer. At home, more families are finding time to sit and enjoy their meals together, talk about their work, the children’s studies, their community and church activities, and intimate questions about human sexuality, which were taboo before. A great catechesis is going on.

There is no reason why this catechesis cannot be transformed into something infinitely larger, involving all the other churches and religions. Where before doctrinal differences had tended to set one religion against another, the defense and protection of the human family makes it necessary for all religions to come together and thwart the advance of all secularist and relativistic forces against the very idea of religion. All religions have a duty to defend God’s covenant with man and the human family, and the best way to do so is for the Christian to become a good Christian, the Jew a good Jew, the Moslem a good Moslem, and together defend the right of the family to be free from any atheistic impositions by the State and the right of God to be present in every heart and every home and in the public square.


[1] Pope Benedict XVI quoting his own 2006 homily at mass in Islinger Feld, Regensburg, in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, 29 June 2009
[2] The others are India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Columbia.

The Battle for Life and the Family in the Philippines

Note from Blog Admin:

Sen. Tatad has recently returned from a trip to England, where he delivered a speech at the National Conference held by the Society for the Protection of the Unborn (SPUC). To learn more about SPUC, click here. The text of the speech delivered at the conference is attached below.

The battle for life and the family

in the Philippines

By Sen. Francisco S. Tatad

and Ma. Fenny Cantero Tatad

at the SPUC National Conference 2009

Hayes Conference Centre, Swanwick,

Derbyshire, England

06 September 2009

My wife and I have been on the road for a little while now. We started in Amsterdam first part of August to address the World Congress of Families, then we flew on to New York for some meetings, then to Chicago to visit an ailing kin, then finally to Washington DC to see our daughter, her husband and their one year-old first born son, the youngest of our seven grandchildren from three married children out of seven. Indeed how gracious and sweet it is of our dear friend John Smeaton and his colleagues at the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) to have us meet some of the finest people in Britain as we begin the 40^th year of our married life, and to make it possible for us to join the rest of our board in the International Right to Life Federation (IRLF) right here, and I refer to our chairman Dr. Jack Wilke, Jim Hughes of Canada, Bill Saunders of the US, Dr. Talmir Rodriguez of Brazil, Chiang Lim of Australia, and John himself.

It is with the greatest joy that we have come to Swanwick, Derbyshire to speak to you about the battle for life and the family in the Philippines. Nowhere perhaps in the developing world is this battle being fought at this time as in our mostly Catholic country where the people’s faith in the sanctity of human life, marriage and the family, tested daily by the toxic influence of entertainment media, fashion and various other addictions, continues to draw so much pressure from the forces of secularism and relativism abroad.

In our country, where we might have learned to speak the Queen’s English had history taken a different course, the poverty of millions has given the various interested parties an easy excuse to proclaim to the poor that their traditional thinking about life and human sexuality and their outdated social conventions have become permanent obstacles to progress. But nothing could seem to dim our people’s faith in what they have always believed all their lives.

For all their weaknesses, the Filipinos are holding up. Human life remains sacred, and most of their families are intact. Abortion remains banned and punishable; divorce, civil partnership, same-sex union, etc. are out; the only sexes they recognize are male and female; the only marriage they acknowledge is the sacramental or civil union of one man and one woman for one lifetime. No penal law bans contraception or sterilization, but the State may not legally promote or propagate either; the Constitution bars it.

Our fight for life and the family then is slightly different from yours in terms of focus. Your main problem is legalized abortion and euthanasia, now euphemistically called end of life care. Our concern is state-run contraception and sterilization, the first step towards legalized abortion. But those committed to downsizing the family and the population would like to see us legalize abortion. So the battle rages.

At the beginning of this century, the Philippines became the thirty-fifth largest economy and the twelfth most populous country in the world. Its 90-million population, spread over 300,000 square kilometers of its own and various parts of the five continents, remains poor, with a GDP per capita (PPP) of $3,900. It is growing at an annual rate of 2.03%, with a total fertility rate (TFR) of 3.02, according to its National Statistics Office. The CIA World Fact Book, 2008, however, quotes the birth rate at 1.72%, the TFR at 3.00.

About 12 million Filipinos live and work in foreign countries, a good number of them here in the United Kingdom, out of necessity and by choice. A million more migrate abroad each year, leaving their families behind, in most cases. This imposes quite a burden on their families, but largely because of the support of their kin, friends and faith community, they generally manage to cope. The prolonged separation of spouses, however, normally curtails further new births.

The natural trend has been away from large families toward the smaller family, usually five--- three children and the two parents. My wife and I have seven children, but we are the exception rather than the rule. Still the extended family continues to grow through the marriage of their children. Every Filipino marriage brings together not only the newly married couple but also their respective original families. It is not unusual to find in many parts of the country three or more generations living together, and an entire clan living in a family compound as a small community.

The great majority of our people are young. The average worker is 23, younger than his counterpart in the industrial countries. While birth and fertility rates are irreversibly tumbling down everywhere and the most authoritative sources are warning against the rapid ageing and inevitable shrinking of Europe’s native population in less than fifty years, our own birth and fertility rates stand above the replacement level, and the great majority of our people and our fundamental law itself continue to recognize human life, the family and marriage as sacred and inviolate.

Paradoxically, the First World’s bitter harvest of broken homes, shattered lives and a demographic winter that has replaced the old myth of an exploding population with the grim reality of irreversible depopulation has failed to dampen the resolve of the downsizers of the family and the general population to infect us with their failed policies and programs. Since the whole of last year, while the world teetered at the brink of economic collapse, a prodigious number of Philippine legislators have been trying to push a reproductive health (RH) bill that contains everything proscribed by the Constitution, local custom, and the people’s religious beliefs and which attacks every aspect of human life and family life.

For obvious reasons, the bill stops short of seeking the legalization of abortion. But it tries to open a door to its eventual decriminalization. It proclaims the two-child family as a model for Filipinos, and seeks to establish a state-run contraceptives and sterilization program for all interested, and compulsory sex education for young children without parental consent. All this, despite the constitutional provision proclaiming the state as the equal protector of the mother and the unborn from the moment of conception, and parents as the primary educators of their children. The same constitution proclaims the family as the foundation of the nation, and marriage as the foundation of the family and as an autonomous and inviolate social institution.

Although the bill is driven by the same ideology driving the more widely known proposed Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) in the United States, there is a striking contrast between the principles behind the two bills. One is not less dangerous than the other. But where the US bill wants to grant the individual a nonexistent right “to begin, prevent, continue, or terminate a pregnancy” without “governmental interference and discrimination,” the Philippine bill wants to give the State the equally nonexistent right and duty to prevent women from conceiving.

In a less Orwellian setting, given our unabashedly pro-life and pro-family Constitution, our legislators should have been the first ones to recognize the limit of their jurisdiction. The bill should not have been filed or drafted at all. If at all, it should have been declared void ab initio, and promptly archived by the standing committees to which it had been referred.

Yet the proponents tried to steamroll the bill by reporting it out for floor debate after only one committee hearing in the House of Representatives, and without requiring a valid quorum in the Senate committee hearings. Self-serving newspaper ads and highly suspect opinion surveys commissioned by the RH lobby claimed overwhelming public support for the bill even though only a few lawmakers appeared to have read its text. In the 2007 congressional elections the biggest vote-getter among the party-list parties was the pro-life “Buhay”, the Filipino word for “Life,” rather than any other party identified with reproductive health.

One of the first things we did was to email a copy of the bill to John Smeaton in London and to Bill Saunders in Washington and ask for their assessment. Their prompt response assured us we were not alone in our concerns about the bill. We copied their position to our friends in Congress, the bishops, priests and laymen at the frontline, who found it useful in finalizing their stand.

Meanwhile, a small band of “catholic scholars” from a Jesuit-run university declared in an open letter that despite the bill’s total disregard of Church teaching on the evil of contraception and sterilization, Catholics should be able to support it “in good conscience.” This was followed by some economists and “scientists” whose statements read like boiler-plate copies of each other.

Joining the debate, a group of 42 international scholars from well-known Catholic universities, seminaries and centers of research and special studies in the United States, Europe and the Middle East jointly rebuked the local academics for misrepresenting the truth of the Catholic faith, and said that no Catholic in good conscience could possibly support the bill. That silenced the pro-RH scholars.

Throughout this time, officials of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), notably the Episcopal Commission on Family and Life (ECFL), engaged with the leaders of Congress through the Bishops-Legislators Caucus of the Philippines (BLCP). As the need arose, they also wrote individual letters to all the lawmakers. Along with the other bishops, they brought the issue directly to the people through pastoral letters read in churches at Holy Mass. Then they engaged individual lawmakers in private, discussing with them the far-reaching cultural and ethical implications of the bill.

For their part, various lay organizations, women and family associations packed the galleries of both Houses daily, and held pickets and prayer rallies, just to increase the pressure on Congress. Lay professionals engaged the proponents in public forums, even those organized and funded by the RH propaganda office, and where the moderators and media anchormen and women made no attempt to be objective or neutral during the give-and-take. Leading opponents of the bill used their blogs to keep their public updated.

Before long many congressmen sent word that they were withdrawing from the bill, and many more, that they were seriously rethinking their original position. Alarmed and hoping for a favorable vote before any further defections, the authors and sponsors now tried to curtail the House debate by proposing the use of the guillotine. To this the pro-life and pro-family bloc replied that at least twenty-five of them had been waiting in line to take part in the debate and that any of them might be sorely tempted to filibuster if there was any attempt to impose cloture. That did it. The second of the twenty-five is still holding the floor even as we speak.

But towards the adjournment sine die of the last session in June, while the pro-life and pro-family groups were focused on blocking the RH bill, the pro-RH bloc managed to sneak in an undebated Magna Carta of Women during the logrolling of otherwise innocuous personal bills. What had begun as a harmless women’s bill had been turned into a harmful one --- one that yielded a cleverly reworded version of the proposed state-run contraceptives and sterilization program in the RH bill. Its passage would have rendered superfluous the passage of the strongly opposed RH bill.

In the original draft, the pro-life and pro-family bloc had agreed that the State could provide women with “ethical, effective, safe and legal methods of family planning.” This provision would allow the State to provide women free access to natural family planning, which does not mean contraception or sterilization, both of which are ethically unacceptable. In the final version, however, the word “ethical” was dropped, thereby changing the meaning of the provision altogether, oddly enough without anyone in the anti-RH bloc noticing.

As soon as the bishops saw it, they protested the maneuver and warned that unless the bicameral conference committee restored the word “ethical” in the bill’s final version, there could be a firestorm. The committee finally relented, putting to rest all objections to the bill. So we now have an acceptable magna carta for women.

Still, not completely chastened by that incident, the pro-RH bloc tried to bring in the RH language wherever they could, even in completely alien topics of legislation. Thus when Congress was trying to beat the deadline for a bill on agrarian reform, they inserted in the committee bill a provision that gave landowning rights to poor “women in productive and reproductive labor.” Despite the obvious irrelevance of the term “reproductive” it took time and effort to delete it from the text.

The real malice, however, is that while the RH bill tries illegally to replace the constitutional policy on what current UN-speak calls “reproductive health,” there is not only an unconstitutional policy already in place but above all an unconstitutional program which the government has been funding illegally for years. The program began in the early seventies during martial law under President Ferdinand Marcos, long before the 1987 Constitution barred state intervention in the family life of married couples. It relied heavily on funding from foreign governments, multilateral and other donor institutions, and entrenched itself as a bureaucracy within a bureaucracy, despite the 1987 constitutional policy that had rendered it void.

Thus, in the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, the Philippine Secretary of Health could entertain a closed door gathering of international NGOs with stories of how he had used the US relief agency CARE to transport condoms and other contraceptives to the farthest places in the country along with US relief goods.

It was in Cairo where the least developed countries (LDCs) were first put on notice that they would eventually have to bear the cost of their own long-term RH programs, and for this purpose should be prepared to raise some $20.5 billion by 2010. Since then the country’s yearly RH budget has bloated, even though there has never been enough money for basic and high quality education, food production, low-cost housing, running water and basic sanitation for the poor or programs to save women from the major common killers. This year it appropriated two billion pesos. At the same time, foreign grants and donations for reproductive health continue to pour in to the government and the NGOs which are accountable to no one but their foreign funders.

The latest and by far the most devious and sinister move involves a constitutionally destructive campaign to bamboozle or coerce local government councils----in this case, mostly city councils-----into legislating the very program which, as we have seen, Congress itself does not have the constitutional authority to legislate. Local councils, which are not nearly equal to Congress, customarily enact ordinances (not laws) applicable to their constituents on matters within their jurisdiction and legal competence. How married couples perform their conjugal duties and exercise their conjugal rights is not subject to legislation, except perhaps in a totalitarian system. Assuming for the sake of argument it is, it is surely beyond any local council’s jurisdiction and competence; the local council would in that case be usurping a power not its own.

Yet upon the prodding of the RH lobby, several city councils have adopted their RH programs without much deliberation or debate. Many have entered into direct agreements with foreign governments and international organizations, or signed memorandums of agreement with the Department of Health to implement a massive contraception and sterilization program as though there were no insurmountable constitutional and moral obstacles to it. And donor governments and institutions, supported by a less than critical mass media, are the first ones to promote this gross disregard and destabilization of the Constitution while talking about the constitutional order and rule of law everywhere in the world.

Ideally, there should be easy recourse to the Supreme Court against such naked violation of the Constitution on so important an issue. But the pro-life and pro-family groups feel they should seek such a court ruling only after everything else has failed. So they must fight it out in Congress, the mass media, the schools, the parishes, every conceivable public forum, and each one’s private personal apostolate.

The problem continues to intensify particularly because of uncertainties in our national politics and increased pressure from abroad. US President Barack Obama’s lifting of the ban imposed by President Reagan’s Mexico City policy of 1984 on the use of American money for abortion activities in developing countries could bring in more RH money through the US AID. The other rich countries could flood our cities and countryside with more NGO workers determined to turn the country into an ideological war zone.

At the same time continuing efforts of the UN committee for the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discriminations Against Women (CEDAW) and the committee monitoring compliance with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) to compel UN member-states to change their laws against abortion---to name just two---could ultimately alter the situation in our country if we elect a morally indifferent president in 2010 who would easily succumb to external pressure, or hold a constitutional convention that would render the pro-life and pro-family provisions of the present Constitution subject to change.

Although the UN treaties themselves do not oblige any country to legalize homosexuality, divorce, or abortion, the UN bureaucrats and “experts” monitoring their implementation have arrogated unto themselves the power to interpret them according to their own ideological orientation. And many fail to see this as a grave disorder. The most vulnerable are countries whose political leaders will trade their country’s sovereignty for foreign political support.

Many things need to be done to turn back the tide. At the international front, the United Nations must be recalled to its original mandate of promoting the peaceful and harmonious cooperation between and among nations rather than involving itself in the most intimate affairs of the family. Although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is, strictly speaking, not a treaty, there must be greater respect for it, particularly Article 16, par. 3, which declares that “the family is the natural and fundamental group of society, and is entitled to protection by society and the State.” The UN must now be also more attentive in monitoring compliance with the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, adopted a day before the Universal Declaration, which classifies measures “to prevent births” within a certain group of people as “genocide.”

There may be a need, and it is probably time, for the UN to conclude an international convention intended solely to prevent states, organizations of states, and their instrumentalities from controlling the reproductive faculties of men and women through state-mandated contraception, sterilization and abortion, instead of protecting the life and dignity of every human being from conception until natural death. For her part, the universal Church could probably finally come out with her Catechism on the Family, as earlier mentioned in the papal document, Familiaris Consortio.

In our country today, there is an urgent need to elect political leaders whose desire to uphold the sanctity of human life, marriage and the family is integral to any desire they may profess to defend the country’s sovereignty from any foreign interference in its domestic affairs, and lift it from poverty, corruption and moral decay. For the first time in our history, our predominantly Catholic electorate will need to choose truly good and faithful Catholic leaders who would exemplify authentic Catholic virtues, more than mere values, in public life. This is not to say we will need a confused cleric or any kind of preacher at all to lead any kind of theocracy; that would be a cure worse than the disease. It simply means having the best qualified, well-formed Catholic lay person or persons preferably to lead the government of this predominantly Catholic country.

Whether or not that comes to pass, we will simply have to rely on the strong faith of our people who, with nothing more than their native and innate good sense, have no problem recognizing that human life is a God-given gift without which nothing else is possible---the only gift that creates the recipient of the gift themselves within the family through a man and a woman united permanently and exclusively in marriage. Without the gift, the recipient does not exist; no human being therefore may claim the right to suppress or destroy it for being “unwanted.”

Despite all the gender workers trying to teach our poor women to call their pregnancies “unwanted,” we have not learned to use that word to describe anyone born or unborn the way they do so casually in other parts of the world.

We believe our Creator God calls no one to existence whom he does not want; and no mere creature has the right to override his will. Human life is an open sea that can take every drop of dew or rain that falls; it is not a gated piece of property which we, who walk the earth, could claim as our own and keep everyone else out as trespassers. For the poorest Filipinos therefore the fight for the unborn and for the natural family is no mere human struggle; it is God’s first before it is our own, and we continue to believe that God never loses any battle.

May the victory come to all of God’s children around the world soon.

Can we still rise from the morass?

What exactly are we, the people, entitled to know about the President’s state of health whenever he or she goes for a medical check or is actually sick? This need not be extensively debated. The Constitution says it; it is not contingent upon public curiosity or presidential discretion or taste.

Section 12 of Article VII provides: “In case of serious illness of the President, the public shall be informed of the state of his health. The Members of the Cabinet in charge of national security and foreign relations and the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines shall not be denied access to the President during such illness.”

“In case of serious illness” is the operative clause. At anytime the healthiest president could undergo some medical tests or actually get sick. He or she is not mandated by law to keep the nation posted on any minor ailment. In actual practice, however, a medical bulletin is normally issued to keep the public informed through the press. If any procedure was performed, there is usually a brief statement about it and then the usual words about the President having been given a clean bill of health.

When is a president’s illness deemed serious? If and when there is a fair chance of dying or developing some longterm complications or being permanently disabled. If the President suffers a stroke or heart attack, or tests positive for cancer and is consequently confined, physically incapacitated and no longer able to perform nomal bodily functions, then even a mere layman would know his or her illness is serious.

When that happens, Sec. 12 begins to operate. The public must be told about the true state of the President’s health. No one may bar the Secretaries of Foreign Affairs and Defense, the National Security Adviser and the AFP Chief of Staff from having access to the President, just in case any member of his family or circle of close friends should want to hide the gravity of his or her serious illness from the public and his or her immediate successor, the Vice President.

In the final years of President Ferdinand Marcos, the Cabinet and the public remained in the dark amid thick rumors that the strongman had fallen seriously ill and had secretly undergone a kidney transplant. As columnist for a morning daily at the time, having resigned from the Cabinet where I had served as information minister for ten years, I learned about the transplant and wrote about it. Sources close to Marcos confirmed this much later, after his fall from power in 1986, but not while he was in office.

The framers of the 1987 Constitution obviously had that situation in mind when they introduced the previously quoted Sec. 12. Under Sec. 11 (same Article) they also provided that “whenever a majority of all the Members of the Cabinet transmit to the President of the Senate and to the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of his office as Acting President.”

Such is the grave implication of serious presidential illness to the stability of the Constitution that it may not, at any time, be kept hidden from the public. The following questions may now be asked:

1. Is Mrs. Arroyo suffering from any serious sickness which Malacanang has tried to hide or is trying to hide from the Cabinet or the public?

2. Is she bedridden or incapacitated?

3. Were the tests conducted on her at the Asian Hospital related to any major complaint, and have the results been kept secret?

If the answer to these questions is yes, then we must hold her accountable to the public. It appears, however, the answer is in the negative. The heat of the controversy seems to focus rather on the report that as a much younger woman, Mrs. Arroyo had a breast implant performed on herself in the eighties. The old technology had begun to falter, and repair had to be done. It was as simple as that. It was a simple cosmetic procedure to correct something that by no stretch of the imagination could be called a disease.

Mrs. Arroyo’s spokesmen were stupid enough to try to dispute the mercilessly detailed scoop by our columnist-friend Jarius Bondoc, thereby adding to the frenzy of the text-messaging that had gone around the world. No real national interest or national security issue has been clarified by the sharp focus on this incident. But many of us seem convinced they could change the status quo just by talking to death about the hair growth that had reportedly been shaved off the presidential groin and armpits.

This kind of stuff diminishes us. We have to rise from the morass. As critics and political adversaries, it may be easy enough for us to exploit details that attack Arroyo’s feminine self-esteem rather than her politics. But our duty to Christian charity advises us against it; noblesse oblige. Our duty, it seems to me, is to elevate the public debate by segregating the serious health issue from this “woman thing” which we do not begrudge other women we truly admire and everybody else. As someone who has tried since 2001 to make Mrs. Arroyo accountable for the worst degradations in our politics I would not want it said that where I had failed to dent her political armor with fundamental questions about constitutional legitimacy and moral integrity, I finally succeeded by talking simply about her ruptured silicon and armpits.

I would not know how to defend myself from that.

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8 July 2009

Will the U.S. intervene in the 2010 elections?

At the US July Fourth reception on July 2 Ambassador Kristie Kenney was asked pointblank if her government would be “concerned” over a “postponement” of the 2010 Philippine elections. The question contained a hypothesis rather than a fact, and a potential headline written into it. Mrs. Kenney answered “yes” and that gave Philippine Star a brilliant scoop which it proudly bannered the next day---“US: No to ‘no-el’,” (the last word, for “no elections”).

This was fully congruent with Kenney’s prepared text where she said, “one of the values that we share with our American friends is a fierce commitment to electoral democracy and the institution of suffrage.” Elections are a good way of renewing democracy, she added. Over the years various U.S. institutions have made it a point to observe the periodic conduct or misconduct of Philippine elections.

But the subject here was “postponement” of elections. Given the unanswered questions at the Commission on Elections about automated voting, the move in Congress to propose a shift to parliamentary government, and the various scenarios being dreamed up by various parties for 2010, a postponement of the elections could not, in principle, be completely ruled out. Even without those problems a postponement remains a possibility, no matter how remote. What would happen, for example, if and when a major natural calamity should occur on election day and people are no longer able to venture outside their homes? Certainly no elections could be held; they would be automatically postponed.

So it is possible. But probable? That’s another story altogether. “Possibility” has never been the same as “probability.” And despite fears of a possible failure of elections, no one has actually proposed or is proposing a postponement. So its possibility is purely speculative and hypothetical as of now, and it was a purely hypothetical question that was put to Kenney. A diplomat of lesser spunk would probably have declined: “I’m sorry, I don’t answer hypothetical questions.” But Kenney obviously thought it best to send a clear signal to those who may be planning mischief to do away with the 2010 elections.

Now we have it in black and white. The US would be “concerned” if the elections were postponed, and there are various ways of making such concern felt by the parties involved. It is a warning to all ---not just to the Arroyo administration but to everyone else who may be planning to supplant the elections with their own schemes. No doubt Kenney’s words have a positive impact on the thinking of many Filipinos. They may now feel a little more confident that the elections would be held as scheduled, despite the absence of any prospect for real change or any truly worthy candidates for the highest office. But we cannot misread her words to mean the U.S. will “intervene to ensure clean and free elections.” The U.S. will react accordingly if we mess up our electoral process, but they will not tell us how to conduct our sovereign business.

How would all this affect those who want to see parliamentary elections rather than presidential ones in 2010? They do not want the elections postponed; they simply want the form of government changed. Of course the idea is strongly opposed by many, this writer included, and we are convinced we are right. But what happens if and when, despite our strongest opposition, the Supreme Court ultimately upholds what we believe is an unconstitutional way of proposing constitutional amendments, and the people do not rise in protest but remain apathetic?

Once more, this is hypothetical, it may or may not happen at all. But having already answered one hypothetical question, could not the ambassador tell us now how Washington would react to it? Of course, we would respect her silence if she decides she has already said enough or more than enough on the subject.

I am a great Kenney fan, particularly for her public diplomacy skills. You see her wholesome face in public billboards in Palawan, Visayas and Mindanao, and she is not much less visible than my friend Sen. Dick Gordon in highly publicized humanitarian operations. But something about her non-verbal idiom, as recorded by the Star, invites careful decoding.

In the four-column center photo below the Star’s July 3 headline, Kenney is flanked by the Air Force Chief Lt. Gen. Oscar Rabena and Navy commander Vice Admiral Ferdinand Golez. She is sparkling in her evening dress, and the flag officers are resplendent in their gala uniforms. But Kenney’s left hand is shown resting gently on Vice Admiral Golez’s strong right shoulder. What was it doing there?

Not having gone to a finishing school for diplomats, most readers will not know what to make of it. I have tried to understand international diplomacy most of my life, and I do not know what it means. Could the good ambassador or the Department of Foreign Affairs please enlighten us on it? It feels good to be able to think that if things fell apart, we could always rely on the US to help us pick up the pieces. But as a 111-year-old republic, we should by now be able to stand on our own instead of expecting our former colonial master to sort out our sovereign affairs for us. Even the U.S. may have no need for such subservience.

The jewels of Imelda Marcos

Imelda Romualdez Marcos is now eighty years old. She has lost little of her charm; the political rubbishing she has received since her husband Ferdinand fell from power and died has failed to dent her self-confidence. She still thinks of doing things for the poor as though she had never left her job in human settlements. She has learned to look beyond her critics and believes she has found peace. Watch her move inside a shopping mall or wet market, and you’ll see people reaching out to touch her. Watch those who have set themselves above her: no one at all seems to mind them. Not even the New York Times minds talking about her in lieu of her country or its government.

While court cases have piled up against the Marcos estate (of which Imelda is the executor), none of them has moved, purportedly for lack of evidence. In the only celebrated case that ever went to trial in New York City in 1990, the now legendary Rudolph Giuliani did his best to convict the accused, and she literally spat blood in open court, but after a seemingly interminable trial, Imelda won an acquittal that stunned her critics and supporters alike. Her biggest and toughest battle, however, has always been in the media where the cruelest caricature and cliches about her persist. Negative press opinion terrifies state prosecutors, judges and justices from confessing openly that sufficient evidence does not exist against her in any of her cases, and that, however terrible or unacceptable it may appear, the law seems to favor her side.

Nothing illustrates this better than the case of her jewelry which the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) had carted away when Marcos fell in 1986 and those seized by the US government when the Marcoses arrived in Hawaii and subsequently turned over to the PCGG by the US government. Who owns these jewelry is a question of law rather than of political opinion, but the PCGG seems inclined to act on the basis of what the editorials and columnists would say rather than on the basis of what the law actually says.

When Cory Aquino proclaimed a revolutionary government in 1986, she could have confiscated all the Marcos properties and declared them forfeit to the state. This is what successful revolutions usually do. But she never did. Instead, she decreed that all questionable Marcos assets be simply sequestered or frozen until they were declared by a competent court to have been ill-gotten. Thus any question about the ultimate ownership of any sequestered asset must be resolved according to a specific constitutional process.

Under the Constitution, the PCGG had 18 months from February 7, 1987, or until August 7, 1989, to sequester and freeze assets believed to have been ill-gotten, upon a showing of a prima facie case. If the assets had been sequestered or frozen before February 7, 1987, judicial action to declare them ill-gotten and forfeit to the state should have taken place within six months from that date. If the assets had been sequestered or frozen after that date, such action should have been commenced within six months from the sequestration or freezing of the same. If no such action had been commenced during the said period, the sequestration or freeze order was deemed automatically lifted.

No court has pronounced the Imelda jewelry ill-gotten. Neither has any forfeiture proceeding been initiated anywhere during the prescribed period. Thus Imelda’s ownership of the jewels stands uncontested, no matter how we may feel about it. No less than the irrepressible Secretary Raul Gonzales has said as much, before he was shifted from the Department of Justice to the Malacanang legal office. If the PCGG could show no legal basis for holding on to the jewels, it should return them to their rightful owner, he said. Why then does the PCGG tenaciously cling on to them despite such authoritative prodding, and the owner’s own repeated demands for their immediate return? One can only speculate.

The PCGG is apparently scared to do what is legally right but which the old enemies of Marcos may not be prepared to accept. After all, it took many of them a long time to accept the fact that the communists, as Marcos had said from the very start, rather than Marcos himself, as the victims had claimed, had thrown the grenade at Plaza Miranda that nearly wiped out the entire opposition in 1971. They were not prepared to see that Marcos was innocent of the heinous crime which they had led themselves and the rest of the nation to believe had been his handiwork. Something similar could be happening here, again.

Having made the world believe that everything the Marcoses had was ill-gotten, the PCGG does not have what it takes to admit it has no right to the jewels. They have apparently calculated that regardless of what the law says, the people are not likely to march for Imelda if her rights were violated, whereas the PCGG commissioners could be in real trouble if they fail to consider the sentiments of the old enemies of Marcos. So it would be safer to be constitutionally wrong but politically correct. But no society endures which sacrifices the law to personal vendetta or political correctness.

Prime Minister, anyone?

One reason, it is said, why Ferdinand Marcos stayed in power far beyond his unprecedented second term was because he had seen how badly our former presidents and especially former first ladies were treated by the snooty rich and he would have none of it. Now, one question being put to our prematurely campaigning presidential aspirants in some inane TV forum is, “If elected, will you send Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to jail?”

That is no incentive for the outgoing and termed-out president to think of riding into the sunset or writing her memoirs. One current text message fires its own bullet: “Amend the Constitution now and allow two terms for the President: the first one in office, the second in jail.” Mrs. Arroyo has to think of life after Malacanang, and that’s what we are seeing right now.

It would be a violent trampling of the Constitution if Mrs. Arroyo tried by any means to extend her term as president. She knows it will not fly, so she won’t do it. But nothing prevents her seeking a change in the Constitution to allow her to stay on. The Russians and some Latin Americans have done it, so Mrs. Arroyo’s allies in the House of Representatives are eager to have a constitutional shift to parliamentary government where she could----not necessarily would---- become prime minister (PM).

There are several steps. 1) The House proposes the appropriate constitutional amendments without the Senate; 2) the Supreme Court (SC) rules that the procedure, if and when questioned, is constitutional and correct; 3) a plebiscite is held and the people ratify the proposed amendments; 4) parliamentary elections are held in which Mrs. Arroyo is elected Member of Parliament (MP); and 6) Mrs. Arroyo is elected PM by her peers.
The plan could miscarry if: 1) the House excludes the Senate from the process and the SC says no, it cannot be done; or 2) the SC says it is all right but the people rise in protest and throws out the entire government, including all the justices; or 3) the process goes all the way up to a plebiscite but the people reject the proposed shift, and their votes are counted and reported accurately by the Commission on Elections (Comelec); or 4) their votes are misreported and they rise in revolt.

The parliamentary scenario is repugnant to many, not necessarily because of what is being proposed but rather because of its timing. Not now, says the sign in many places. They do not want Mrs. Arroyo to benefit from it, that’s all. “Kami naman,” they say. Despite her reputed unpopularity, however, Mrs. Arroyo remains the strongest political player who is in a position to dictate her terms. She has survived all challenges and left no real challengers standing except for a few showbiz-oriented characters who are busier posing for their TV ads than having a real impact on our people’s lives.

She will stay in power if she can, and we will just have to stop her if we can. As the process is constitutional, we will have to use constitutional means. That means meeting the parliamentary proponents in open debate on the floor of the House, in the media, and ultimately in court. Should we fail, we could either submit gracefully or take up active resistance. But the result of the latter is not predictable and the consequence of failure incalculable and usually more than unpleasant. And what if the people do not respond at all?

Should the initiative prosper and the people accept it, we will have to elect MPs, one for each district. Mrs. Arroyo could then run in Pampanga, Pangasinan, Quezon City or Iligan. If Pampanga, which is our best bet, Governor Ed Panlilio, the priest-turned-politician who now wants to become president also, will have a rare opportunity to frustrate her bid, if he is truly as popular in Pampanga as he appears to be in some unorthodox small circles in Metro Manila. That would cut her off the prime ministership, without necessarily making the giant-killer a prime ministerial candidate.

Should Panlilio fail to stop her, she surely becomes material for PM. But only if her party wins most of the seats, or failing that, if her party coalesces with other parties to form the majority bloc. Becoming PM then is not a given and cannot be assumed as such. It will be up for grabs, and Mrs. Arroyo will have to fight for it. Others could contest the prime ministership.

For example, Danding Cojuangco of NPC, who missed the presidency in 1992, could become an MP and seek the PMship. So could former President Joseph Ejercito Estrada, without having to worry about the legality of his becoming head of government again. So could former President Fidel V. Ramos, if he’s still strong with Lakas. So could Manny Villar, Mar Roxas, Makati Mayor Jojo Binay, MMDA’s Bayani Fernando and everyone else who wants to become president. Even Smart’s Manny Pangilinan and former Speaker Jose de Venecia could also join the fun. They could all coalesce just to deny Mrs. Arroyo the PMship, if they want.

The only real problem is that these are politicians divided by a common ambition, and they seem to have carved their political motto upon stone: “Divided we stand, united we fall.”