Boy, El Jefe is certainly shaping up to be the real "change" President. Federalism? Charter change? Getting rid of the sixty-forty? Duterte seems like the kind of candidate keyboard jockeys on the internet have been dreaming of.
Recently, Duterte did what no other President before him had the guts to do. He called out the Catholic church as a bunch of hypocrites. I guess he can do that now that he's won but still, it's amazing. Conventional wisdom always had it that you don't want to go against the church. Hence. many candidates do not take the controversial positions like pro-divorce or pro-abortion. This aura of power stems mainly from the role the church played in the People Power movement.
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| A legacy of Sin, so to speak. (He called distributing condoms "intrinsically evil", BTW) |
I've always been skeptical about this. Sure, groups like Iglesia ni Cristo do wield actual power since they have no qualms about playing the game and vote by bloc; their members voting according to the orders of their leaders. But the Catholic church? It doesn't exactly force people to vote the way they want to. The best they can do nowadays are passive-aggressive statements of fatuous moralizing. But is the fear that they can whip up enough people to march on the streets still a valid one? Personally, I think their power has waned. People were frustrated enough of the status quo to elect Duterte, an alleged killer, into office and the church is as "status quo" as you can get. Nevertheless, with Duterte's recent comments and his commitment to family planning, the church's power will be tested. We shall see.
Speaking of family planning, I'm not fond of the idea the RH Law has, as I have written before. Not because of some religious concern, mind you, but because I think government has no business subsidizing people's sex lives at the taxpayer expense. Let people buy their own goddamn condoms. You mean to tell me if drunkard Pedro decides to bang his wife four times a week, the Philippine public has to pay for it? I also have doubts of its effectiveness since it merely gives free stuff and doesn't use any coercive power on families to control their size but I digress.
You know, family planning has been done before. During Martial Law, the Population Commission was created to do pretty much the same things we want to do today. So what happened? Has it made any impact? Surely there would be data by now to show if its methods were effective. Did they stop? There was a point where they were operational so what's the data on that? Did they reduce population growth because it seems like they didn't. I can't pull facts and figures out of nowhere and it's not easy to simply get data on this but I think it would be valuable.
That's worth looking into.
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