“I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth; I believe in Jesus Christ, His Son…”

 By Pet Melliza/The Beekeeper

A congressman recited and completed that prayer called “Credo” to the last “amen”. His name is Augusto Syjuco (Lakas, 2^nd district, Iloilo). Hallelujah praise the Lord! And he spews that holy vituperation  against the RH Bill.

The social medium FaceBook has a box showing nine members of the Lower House, Syjuco included, who peddle hilarious reasons for opposing the RH Bill.

Their arguments run on a common thread that identifies ideas such as good, evil, morality, heaven, hell, and what not, to have originated from and are revolving around, the super-idea called god.

Syjuco, who faces multi-billion peso plunder case arising from his past job as director general of the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA), cannot think beyond his pietism why the RH Bill is evil other than by the presumption of it being against the will of his diety. Basta lang evil.

It is evil, according to  Rep. Catalina Bagasina, because “(t)he recent calamities are a sign that the RH Bill is bad”.

Her brain just forbids her to learn that greed of giant multinational companies and their Pinoy comprador partners have paved the path to that unimaginable destruction that hit the Compostela Valley and Davao Oriental. Over 1,000 perished and more are still missing.

The multinationals and Pinoy compradors strip, with the blessings of the government, vast areas in the mountains, bare of vegetation. It is the “legal” logging and “legal” mining policies of government that transformed ComVal and Davao Oriental into an ecological wasteland.

The RH Bill has been in the dead files of Congress the last 10 years. Other countries like China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Catholic countries like France, Italy, Spain etc. already enacted their versions eons ago.

The RH Bill is the country’s compliance to the United Nations’s program called “Millennium Development Goal” (MDG) which rallies member-states to attain eight goals by 2015, among them reduction of maternal mortality rate (MMR) and child mortality, increase children’s survival, reduction of AID-HIV cases, and poverty alleviation.

Rep. Thelma Almario is another blessed angel. She stands up against the RH Bill because, “I want to see more OFWs.”

Indeed, this is a reaffirmation that what is essential is invisible to the eye, a gem coming from Plato which Jean Baptist d’Exupery in “The Little Prince” makes more popular.

Rep. Almario refuses to look beyond the phenomenon of OFWs, a question that begs for answers, on the diaspora of Filipinos, 10 million to the latest count, who are driven by poverty from their homes to slave it out in foreign lands.

There is despair in the land and millions of Filipinos are forced to leave and work, in many cases, under subhuman conditions, in other countries if only to feed their children in the Philippines.

If we go by Rep. Almario’s logic, more children, more OFWs, more development. The RH Bill reduces the number of OFWs, hence greater privation in the Philippines. Ergo, down with the bill.

It amuses to guess why such brains ever landed in the halls of Congress.

They amuse and I have nothing else to deduct from or augment to their premises and conclusions.

Why do you oppose the RH Bill?

Rep. Aurelio Gonzales answers: “My parents told me to say no.”

Thanks for the comic relief of having five-year olds in their 40s, 50s, 60s and even older, disguised as honorable members of the Lower House.

And they are not even kidding.