Given this country's unarguable reputation, or notoriety, as the world's greatest copier of everything foreign, we should probably brace up ourselves for another divisive legislative issue that looms in the offing. I am referring to the United Nation's recommendation to the Asia-Pacific region, and that includes the Philippines,
to decriminalize prostitution, the envisioned objective being to prevent kuno the rapid spread of HIV and other sex-related diseases particularly in highly urbanized communities.
Well, that's how we are naman as a nation, di ba?. As soon as one deeply divisive public issue begins to subside, there will surely be another coming. And so, now that the HR Bill is about to bow out from the public forums -- its advocates are now virtually beginning to concede their eventual defeat in Congress -- a new and equally controversial issue, the decriminalization of prostitution, is before us. In due course, this is going to be the subject of endless heated debates from the highest down to the lowest echelons of Philippines society. I just cannot help but ask: "Kala ko ba, one of the primary objectives of the government's unbridled proliferation of condoms and the like throughout the archipelago is to curb STD (sexually-transmitted diseases)? Our drugstores from Batanes to Jolo have long been flooded with condoms and the like even long before the HR Bill became a controversial public issue in these parts. And we all know every call girl in town keeps them handy in their bags. Then, why does the UN suddenly think these contraceptives are not enough and so prostitution now needs to be decriminalized? Doesn't the UN now admit that neither has or may the RH Bill prevent the spread of STDs? With more reason, then, should we throw the RH Bill into the dust bins of perpetual oblivion! But why must the proposal to legalize prostitution suddenly come from the UN.
Kung sabagay, I have long lost my trust on the UN even as an instrument to prevent war. Originally known as League of Nations, it failed to prevent World War I. Changed into its present calling, it ended up as inutile in avoiding World War II, as well, in relatively more recent times, as the Korean and Vietnam Wars Then came the past and still subsisting atrocities in the Middle East which, likewise, the UN has not contained. Even in the very simple territorial rift between China and the Philippines on the Scarborough Shoal, the UN has just been uselessly watching. Alas, the Asia-Pacific should probably first see the UN succeeding in its most important mandate before even mulling that an otherwise clearly cultural or health problem of nations can ever be effectively curable through the decriminalization of prostitution.
Having said the above, I find it rather odd that at this writing only two Senators (Enrile and Pimental) -- quite surprisingly, both males rather than females, at that -- have yet voiced out strong objections to the decriminalization of prostitution in these parts. (Never mind the Church for now; it will surely soon follow, and in a louder voice).
I am more concerned with our honorable(?) lawmakers, of course. Ah, maybe -- just maybe -- the majority of them are yet waiting for certain other worldwide financing institutions, the World Bank, the ADB or the WHO, for example, to endorse the UN's recommendation, realizing as they do that, like in the case of the RH Bill to whose eventual passage these institutions are known to have offered enormous funds disguised as foreign aid, similar carrots are not far behind. And so, for them it's just too early to shed their truer colors in the interim.
In summing up, I hate to say this but I must. There seems to be good reason to believe that it is these so-called "benevolent" financial institutions, supported by the many corrupt local governments they assist in various parts of the world, that are wittingly or unwittingly conspiring together towards the continuing globalization of poverty and economic and cultural degradation in our midst and times.
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