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The House voted to stop debates on the birth control bill. From there the House was to proceed the following day to a vote for or against the bill but a terrible rain fell, flooding the city and environs, prompting the House to cancel the session the following day.
A vote is long overdue. Both sides have had more than enough time to repeat their shallow opinions. What is right with the bill is that it may slow down the birth rate of more poor Filipinos being born into poor families. What is wrong with the bill is that it sidesteps addressing mass poverty directly. It also equates the value of human life with its economic utility. With that equation the Filipino race should step aside for the Chinese which is more productive.
The bill suggests that no one should be born who is not able to pay his or her own way because of poverty, which is due to no jobs in a small economy, which is due to lousy if any education, which is due to having poor parents.
The rest of the bill is fine. It offers a buffet of birth control means: your genitals, your choices.
I went over this bill line by line in my last term. I believe though I may have to see it myself that the provision of sex wagons for every district, stuffed with pornographic paraphernalia and erectile dysfunction pills (as lifestyle drugs they are not covered by the Cheaper Medicine Act and so will be financially catastrophic to dole out) to implement what the authors called "the constitutional right to great sex" by correspondingly great sexual performance has been deleted.
A bill that seeks to cut the birth rate should not extend the male's muscular capability to give sex beyond the body’s natural term. God provided that age should put the penis to sleep and any attempt, let alone program, to reawaken it in an aching simulation of real life defeats a birth control policy. It is in the Bible, what God hath put to sleep let no man disturb the slumber. I forget the chapter and verse but trust me it is there.
Those who seek to prolong sexual performance beyond its natural term should be ashamed of themselves. Wrinkled skin, sagging buttocks, and soft biceps waving like hung laundry with every movement, should not be caressed other than with affection by grandchildren; certainly not by nymphets. Old men should know that young women drawn to their money laugh at them behind their sagging backs.
Women who alone bear the pangs and perils of childbirth should have first and last say whether and when to have kids. That is all there is to it.
Unless men have passed a football through their bowels, men have no right to any opinion regarding family size, let alone priests. "No playa the game, no mayka the rules," a great American said. He was impeached I believe or resigned in a firestorm of protest over a financial anomaly.
The debates have spawned a couple of crazy notions such as:
Indeed, there is no economic justification for birth control and the proof of that is that the UP School of Economics, which once advised Cory Aquino to debauch our currency to make us competitive - Jobo Fernandez killed that and I refused to write a speech to that effect - makes that argument.
But there is a compelling moral justification. If less poor are born to the poor that means less poor are born into poverty from which they will never escape, as Nobel prize economist Stiglitz proves even in the case of America today. To be financially successful you have to inherit most of your money and get most of your promotions from rich and well-connected parents.
The poor never get rich or better off no matter how many or how few they are. There are no exceptions unless the poor rob banks and get away with it. I spit on the anecdotes showing exceptions because closer examination shows their parents were rich or the Chinese community bankrolled them in its fashion.
So more poor just means more poor born into suffering; more kids giggling from sniffing glue to forget their hunger. That is the only reason for birth control and it is a good one. So, shorn of economic reason, there is a moral case for birth control to prevent more poor being born into worsening poverty because this country is going nowhere and will never go anywhere no matter what. At any rate, it is time to put the matter to a vote one way or another.
The Church has the perfect right to preach against birth control and attack its proponents; just like birth control proponents have the perfect right to pontificate about its not entirely fictitious benefits and attack the Church. This is a free country. The church may threaten hell-fire because hell comes only after death. The afterlife is not covered by the constitution nor the Penal Code on grave threats.
Therefore, those who are paid to make laws should put them to a vote now. I have been predicting that the misnamed RH really birth control bill - Confucius said reforms start with calling things as we see them by their real names - will win in the house. It will pass the senate. And, oh yes, about condoms women should have the first and last say not men, not priests, and certainly not the pope because it is women who get, and it is men who give them, sperm, VD, gonorrhea or AIDs.
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