Aquino’s moral-political cliff

By Francisco S. Tatad | Posted on Dec. 28, 2012 at 12:01am | 

While America teeters on the edge of a “fiscal cliff”, a collection of tax increases and spending cuts scheduled for the beginning of next year,  Philippine president Benigno Aquino III appears to have dragged himself to the precipice of a moral and political cliff,  by his naked misuse of presidential power to impose the will of foreign population controllers on outraged Filipinos, mostly Catholics.

To the completely unnecessary problems created by his decision to ram through Congress the patently unconstitutional and highly divisive reproductive health bill,   Aquino’s Liberal Party has now added its own completely avoidable problems, by making the country’s two biggest vote-rich provinces—-Pangasinan and Cebu—the battle zones of premature partisan fighting before the May 2013 elections.

Having earlier tried to destabilize  Pangasinan’s reelectionist Governor Amado Espino to create some partisan space for his LP gubernatorial challenger, Aquino has now trained his guns on three-term Governor Gwen Garcia of Cebu whose congressman-father, Deputy Speaker Pablo Garcia, was among the most eloquent opponents of the infamous RH  bill and whose political family has served the province of Cebu long and well.

By slapping a six-month suspension order on Garcia for alleged “abuse of power,” a charge that could have been more fittingly directed at  Aquino himself, Malacañang apparently expected to render the governorship vacant to allow the LP  to have a free hand running her office during the campaign period for the May 2013 elections.

To Aquino’s chagrin,  Garcia’s supporters, instead of abandoning her for fear of Malacañang reprisal,  closed ranks behind her, and the top three stalwarts of the United Nationalist Alliance –Vice President Jejomar C. Binay, Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile and former President Joseph Ejercito Estrada, who otherwise habitually support Aquino on many issues—have weighed in, in her defense.

Malacañang’s offensive was seen to be coming directly from the camp of Department of Interior and Local Government Secretary Manuel Roxas, the LP president “on leave” who ran  unsuccessfully as Aquino’s  vice presidential candidate in 2010, but seems to be preparing early for his presidential bid  in 2016. This has turned Cebu into a veritable flash point. This is not unwelcome to other forces, who could exploit the opportunity to turn Cebu into a center of  the opposition that is building up against Aquino following his perceived sellout to foreign population controllers on the RH bill.

In particular the archdiocese of Cebu could become the staging point.  The Archdiocese of Manila used to exercise this role under the late  Jaime Cardinal Sin,  who once mobilized a crowd of one million people to oppose the anti-life agenda of the Cairo international conference on population and development in 1994, and played a decisive role in the 1986 EDSA uprising which ousted Marcos and made Cory Aquino, PNoy’s late mother, revolutionary president.

But Manila’s new archbishop, Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle, has taken a relatively low profile with respect to the measure while both Ricardo Cardinal Vidal, archbishop emeritus of Cebu, and the incumbent archbishop, Most Reverend Jose Palma, who is also the president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), have been at the frontline in opposing the bill.

Vidal was the CBCP president who issued the famous CBCP statement on the Feb. 7, 1986 election, which said that because of its shabby conduct, Ferdinand Marcos had lost the moral authority to remain in power.  That provided the “moral basis” for the EDSA revolt.  Although now retired, the cardinal remains  in good health and humor and is the acknowledged leader of the country’s pro-life and pro-family movement.

Governor Garcia and her followers may not necessarily want to convert the  moral and religious groundswell against Aquino into a partisan weapon in their current fight against the LP forces.  But nothing prevents them from pointing out to the Cebuano electorate that the last thing they need would be a governor who would not mind being inside Aquino’s pocket.  Cebu has a proud history: it is where Magellan met his  doom after circumnavigating the globe; it is also where Cory Aquino sought temporary refuge while the 1986 EDSA uprising raged.  The militants could appeal to that history to mount a national anti-Aquino movement.

Many Filipinos mind it very much  that Aquino’s attack on the sanctity of human life and the Filipino family, through the railroading of the RH bill, came on the eve of Christmas, on the third month of  the Year of Faith, as declared by Pope Benedict XVI, and after the canonization of the nation’s second saint, St.  Pedro Calungsod, a 17th century teenage lay catechist from Cebu who died for his faith. But many Cebuanos take it as a personal offense, and feel they have a personal score to settle with Aquino, because of their ethnic affinity with Calungsod.

Such sentiment may have been reinforced even more this season when Pope Benedict XVI  in his Christmas message challenged  Christians (which would include Filipinos) not to bow to any false gods (like an RH bill?) being proposed by some demagogues (like Aquino?) who would like to play God and replace man’s  vision of his own destiny with some diabolical construct.