Duterte’s latest rape joke is on Miss Universe

President Rodrigo Duterte again made a new rape joke on Friday, this time focusing on Miss Universe beauties.

“What I don’t like are kids [being raped],” Mr. Duterte said at a tourism event in his Davao City hometown Friday night.

“You can mess with, maybe a Miss Universe. Maybe I will even congratulate you for having the balls to rape somebody when you know you are going to die,” he said.

The President made the joke after the country’s successful hosting of the Miss Universe beauty pageant last January with officials suggesting the possibility of again hosting the next pageant in November.

Mr. Duterte has repeatedly been criticized, both locally and abroad, for making jokes about rape, even when he was still running for President last year.

During a campaign rally on April 12, 2016, he talked about Australian missionary Jacqueline Hamill who was kidnapped, raped and killed during a Davao City hostage taking incident in 1989.

Then Mayor Duterte said, “She was so beautiful. I thought, the mayor should have been first,” causing a furor, both locally and abroad.

Mr. Duterte later apologized and said he was not joking but only narrating the event.

But last May, he again made a rape joke, urging troops to continue working because he would support them even if they raped three women.

“Just do your job. I will take care of the rest. I will go to jail for you. If you happen to rape three, I will own up to it. If you marry four, you will get clobbered,” the President said in Filipino.

Malacañang again downplayed the remark but that was among the reasons human rights advocate Samira Gutoc-Tomawis cited for her resignation from the Bangsamoro Transition Commission.

During his speech last Friday, Mr. Duterte also bragged he once feigned tuberculosis to escape mandatory military training in college.

He also reiterated his vow to continue his bloody war on drugs despite accusations that thousands of suspects had been killed by police and vigilantes since he took office.

“Human rights? That is bullshit to me,” he said, recalling how he called then US president Barack Obama “a son of a whore” after Washington criticized the wave of killings.

Police say at least 3,200 people were slain in their antidrug operations but rights groups charge that thousands more have been killed by vigilante groups. —With a report from Agence France-Presse