Mocha Uson and harmful free speech

There has been a clamour from people who thought that silencing Mocha Uson would breach one of democracy’s foundational principles: free speech. “Who is going to decide which speech is harmful?” goes Christopher Hitchens’ famous line. Certainly not me. But it so happens that I was one of the 33K petitioners. An explanation is in order, I suppose. Well, for me, the reason is simple. Yes, I support free speech, and I encourage that any person who can come up with a different view must be given extra protection for they might contain a grain of truth.

Mocha Uson admitted her naïveté, “I am not a journalist. It is public knowledge that I am a Duterte supporter so don’t ask for balanced reporting since that is the job of the mainstream media.” Thanks for clearing that up Mocha! The thing I worry about Mocha Uson though is not about her right to it. I believe there is something bigger that we may have missed, and that is her role in this government’s effort to confuse, mislead and agitate poor people who may have no other means of getting nuanced information. I also see her as a willing puppet who will bend and twist facts just to gain favour from Duterte. She is a megaphone for this administration whose main accomplishments so far were, in my humblest opinion, piling over 3,000 dead bodies on the streets, stacking the jails to overcapacity and creating a climate of debilitating fear. She has not lost one bit of her right to free speech, in fact, she has gained lots of it; that her views are given preference and perhaps made into state policy is clearly more terrifying to imagine.

The country is in real danger of becoming a totalitarian state, judging by the current trend of events happening. Duterte having ignored and violated human rights at every opportunity; threatened to suspend writ of habeas corpus; allowed a dictator buried in a heroes cemetery; and possibly implement martial law. Maybe the petition is like “shouting fire in a crowded theatre” scenario. In our case, the petitioners were shouting “Fire! Fire! Fire!” because there is actually a fire in a very overcrowded theatre. When more dead bodies turn up, who can still say Mocha Uson has the right to free speech? Here is where I draw the line.

Just as the democratic world drew the line against Hitler to end the Second World War, now we have the chance to end this almost daily murder of innocent Filipinos and to save the future while we still can.

July 2 Australian Federal Election: A referendum on same-sex marriage

One of the major news last 2014 was same-sex marriage. Then Prime Minister Tony Abbott was confronted by a Year 9 student from Newtown High School of the Performing Arts who was on a trip to Canberra, “Why are you so against legalising gay marriage?” For someone who has a sister, Christine Forster, who is in a same-sex relationship, you would think it would be easy for him to answer this question. PM Abbott is against same-sex marriage and so do most, if not all, of Liberal Party members.

Unlike BREXIT, the concept of equality such as same-sex marriage does not require an expensive $160 million referendum or plebiscite. If the Liberal Party stays true to its ‘liberal’ roots, liberal democracy should not support a referendum, instead this issue should be resolved by just changing the law, which Labor and Greens suggest. Now current PM Turnbull has a real challenge this July 2016 election. Forget Medicare, Gonski or housing affordability, the issue that will really define this election is same-sex marriage. And the Liberal Party has been delaying and are so far behind this issue for so long.

Australians are increasingly becoming in favour of same-sex marriage. Survey shows that 72% of Australians wants same-sex marriage legalised. And that survey was in 2014! PM Turnbull’s strategy to ignore this ‘elephant in the room’ may be his political defeat. Labor Senator Penny Wong, who is gay, thinks that Australia is ready for same-sex marriage, and added that a plebiscite will only allow LGBTQ haters to spout malicious and false claims such as that same sex couples harm children. Of course this myth had been debunked, but some Australians, and few Australian-Filipinos I know, are not keen on accepting this. For example, this religious bigot Cori Bernardi, author of the Conservative Revolution, made a hideous comment that gay marriage will be a slippery slope towards bestiality and polygamy, which is another false claim. If you haven’t noticed yet, the only group opposed to same-sex marriage is the religious group. This group made hating gays a career. Enter the Australian Sex Party, which made a video ridiculing the religious right on its’ dogmatic insistence to control weddings “so gays can’t say I do”. This political Party is not for fun, it was conceived as a “response to increasingly draconian censorship laws and escalating Government encroachment on adult’s civil liberties”.

We are living in the 21^st century now yet sometimes it feels like we are still in 14th century Europe. I might as well remind Australian-Filipinos that Australia is a democracy and there is a constitutional basis (Preamble Section 116) for the separation of church and state. Your religious law to hate (or kill gays) only apply to your religion. So keep your religion to yourself. But we know this is next to impossible.

Australia votes July 2 and if marriage equality matters to you, then you know who to vote for. For sure, it’s not the Liberal Party, unless PM Turnbull suddenly makes a 180 degrees change in policy.

Why Candidates Ignore Secular Filipinos?

Because they can. And because the religious block has traditionally held sway over political candidates for a long time. 

While many still consider the Philippines as a very religious country, I think secularism is more prevalent in the Philippines compared to other Southeast Asian neighbours, say, Indonesia and Malaysia where Sharia is practiced. Throughout the history of our republic, our Founding Fathers had the courage to write in our Constitution the ‘separation of church and state’. But the comparison does not end there, nowadays Filipinos are able to practice secularism more freely in society, for example, we were able to unshackle the religious taboo of using birth control by giving women control over their reproduction through the Reproductive Health Law. Our society is more receptive of women’s rights. The recent furore over presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte’s rape joke about the female Australian missionary who was killed in Davao back in 1989 was one example. Filipinos are more sympathetic towards the LGBT community. When Manny Pacquiao dissed gay people calling them ‘worse than animals’; he got the ire of numerous Filipinos, costing him his Nike sponsorship and precious goodwill in the media.

We have a long way to go in terms of educating Filipinos about the dangers of religious fanaticism, but there are good signs that Filipinos are ready to accept secularism as a social and political reality. Of course, we are not about to force politicians to convert to atheism, but we would be more than satisfied to hear them speak in public against religious bigotry and fanaticism from the likes of Pacquiao, support separation of church and state, respect and protect women’s rights, LGBT rights including same-sex marriage, and to support reproductive health, divorce and euthanasia.

There are no official statistics yet as to the exact number of atheists and non-religious people in the Philippines that I know of, but I am optimistic that the number ranges from one to two million Filipinos, mostly college students and in their early twenties. If this is true, we must tap this resource and put it to good use to pressure and lobby political candidates to go our side. The onus is on us to present a united secular front. When Kabataan Representative Mong Palatino sponsored House bill 6330 seeking to ban prayer in government offices, the Catholic Church was in full force in the media and painted the bill as 'suppressing religion', calling it the ‘ban God bill’, while the best the secular movement in the Philippines could do was wrote blogs about it. Almost everyone in the atheist community was nowhere to be found. I know the secular community in the Philippines is still young, but we must be bold and audacious and we need a vision. Remember, we are not alone! We get huge support from numerous secular organizations that recognize the difficulty and hardship of building a secular community. In countries like Bangladesh, secular bloggers are routinely hacked to death by religious fanatics who view atheists and secularists as threats to their religion. We must never let this happen in the Philippines.

At the end of the day, we must use the political system to hold politicians accountable if they defile our secular values. We owe ourselves and future Filipinos to build a society free from religious tyranny and hatred.