It's The Corruption Stupid

Another example of what Saint Paul likes to call "Catholics being Catholic" from today's Philippine Star (whose masthead reads "Truth Shall Prevail"):

As poverty in this country worsens, some politicians mostly in Congress always seize the opportunity to single out the alleged overpopulation as its main cause, in order to mightily push for the forced reduction of population growth through certain bills now more attractively and euphemistically called "Reproductive Health and Population Management Bills".

Their problem however is that more and more people are now realizing that our country remains poor and is getting poorer because of their own extravagance and corruption in the performance of their job. If they can just give up their pork barrels and forego with their expensive junkets abroad, our country will have saved billions of pesos enough to help improve our economy. Our country remains poor because of corruption in government that started on a large scale during the Marcos regime and continues up to the present on an even larger scale, and not because of the alleged overpopulation and the rapid population growth.

The grand deception becomes more sinister because the bills' sponsors and their supporters who cutely style themselves as "pro quality of life" as well as some misinformed media people continue to insist that these bills do not promote abortion. They even unfairly criticized some bishops, more specifically Ozamiz Archbishop Jesus A. Dosado CM for allegedly spreading disinformation on the bills because he is courageous enough to come out against them with a firm Pastoral statement that politicians who do not promote the sanctity of human life in his territory should be denied communion because "you cannot call yourself Catholic in good standing and at the same time publicly hold views that are contradictory to the Catholic Faith and if you are legislators in my territory then I have the right to refuse you Holy Communion".

At first blush, one might say that the proposed bills are nothing more than an effort to make contraception more widely available in the Philippines. However, if one considers the history of the path that such "reproductive rights" have taken in other countries, it's not surprising that the Catholic Church is resisting the slide down what has proven to be a very slippery slope indeed.