Saving love
While Cebu Archbishop Emeritus Ricardo Cardinal Vidal’s message during the St. Pedro Calungsod National Thanksgiving Mass will be remembered for ages to come, it was no mere show of eloquence but a strategic framing within the Christian ethic of love of, among other things, deliberations in Congress about the Reproductive Health (RH) bill.
The applicability of the cardinal’s homily to a loftier mode of responsible sexuality ought not to be lost on lawmakers who insist on, at the very least, mainstreaming the distribution of artificial family planning implements even though the government already allotted P21 billion for RH programs this year.
The Filipino people deserve an answer from our lawmakers to a couple of questions.
Where did the P21 billion allotted for RH programs go?
If mothers have been dying while giving birth and granted that couples have been multiplying irresponsibly in spite of the availability of such a huge amount of money, the solution lies not in legally wasting more in tax revenues but in first of all checking why efforts to solve the problem turned out futile.
Do our congressmen and senators see Filipino couples as so hopelessly unthinking and bereft of self-mastery that nothing short of mechanical devices can help them space births?
Article continues after this advertisementCan love and parenting be called responsible when its end has become the avoidance of further parenthood that calls forth further love?
Article continues after this advertisementDo our lawmakers see the Filipino youth as so irreparably damaged in their wills they should be free to hop from bed to bed to enjoy the pleasures of sex as long as the girls don’t end up pregnant or the partners don’t wind up with diseases?
What kind of men will we rear our boys to become once our legislators clear the way for them to seek pleasure without restraint and to view women as safe as long as their wombs are empty?
It is not for our legislators to determine the absence of virtue in our married couples and in our young.
Yet that is what they will do in effect when they imbue with the force of law policies that encourage both the symbolic building of sprawling mansions with scarcely any inhabitant and the real engagement in unbridled hedonism.
Senators and congressmen who sit on health committees as well as officials of the Department of Health need to show us where our RH money went and explain why they have failed instead of offering the lame excuse that our coffers are incapable of assisting people in correctly planning their families.
They should also be forthright about the consequences of artificial methods of birth control that have been so far given under their auspices to the people even without a Reproductive Health law.
They cannot hide behind desensitized percentages. One victim of a defective or misused condom, one victim of an intra-uterine device, one victim of a chemical or injectable contraceptive, is one too many.
To count any one as negligible is no show of responsible love.
Neither is viewing our people as slaves of lust.
