Dra. Cabral´s condoms

YOU would know summer is here when all of a sudden you see the bougainvilleas around bloom in exploding profusion and color. Seeing them makes you forget the inconveniences of summer. It tells you summer has its own blessings, its own fun and beauty. You just have to know how to make use of them.

I was reminded of this bougainvillea-in-summer image as I reviewed all this issue about the new Secretary of Health distributing condoms to the public last Valentine´s Day and, as latest news would have it, up to when she ends her term.

Her act offers a precious opportunity—to clarify things. Like the bougainvillea, this task of clarifying may have thorns, but it also has those beautiful flowers.

Frankly, I was amused by all the antics surrounding the controversy. No, I was not irritated or disturbed. Just that, amused.

As a doctor, she is free to prescribe anything she thinks is good for the patient. Of course, that is not infallible. Many doctors have given wrong prescriptions after making wrong diagnoses too. Besides, I still have to convince myself that human fertility is a disease to be cured by some drug or gadget.

But as a public official with zeal to serve the people, she must have felt she has to go beyond simply prescribing. She has to go out to the streets, walk her talk, and give away condoms. That´s where she starts to get some reactions.

Some bishops called for her resignation, an understandable reaction given our democratic system. She answered by calling the Church ¨vicious,¨ lectured professorially on the standard bull about Church-state separation, and instantly attracted the usual following who praised her to high heavens for having balls.

I hope she’ll have the bigger balls to admit that in all this condom business, she also has to input the indispensable moral elements. Morality is not optional. It is not a religious peculiarity. It is a universal, natural need. Its nature is not defined only by practicality. It’s by the very dignity of a human person.

Her first excuse was that she has to do something to curb the rise of HIV-AIDS, and what better way than to spread prophylactics. Children got hold of them too and promptly made them into balloons. Talking about scandals nowadays has already been considered passe.

She said she´s for the ABC method—abstinence, be faithful, and if these fail, then condoms. So you see it´s really not that bad. She´s just being practical. If the moral fails, then why not the immoral, that is still short of aborting and killing. She has a point. Right or wrong, we´ll see. Anyway, who cares about morality nowadays? That’s really our problem today.

Then she also said she has to distribute condoms because our population is just too much or too many. We cannot cope with the people´s needs. In her calculus, condoms will solve the problem or at least give some significant relief.

And by the way, powerful groups like the EU, the US, and others are giving generous grants in Euros and dollars to promote the condoms. We do not know anymore if this open season against morality is driven by conviction or by economic considerations. Knowing our politicians, we have basis to wonder.

What can give a window of hope is that these interfering blocs, already morally bankrupt for some time, are starting to bankrupt themselves financially with the current global economic crisis. Let’s wait a little for how this development unfolds.

In the meantime, other relevant elements spring up. Robin Padilla—I pray for him—obviously paid, is now going around promoting Godless family planning. In the blogosphere—you have to be extremely careful and game there—an orgy of pro-immoral-family-planning sentiments explodes, dripping with mockery, insults and name-calling.

Imagine, Church and spiritual leaders who appeal for a moral sense in this issue are now called Talibans, holdouts of the dark ages, rigid, dense, detached from reality, etc.

The only consolation is that that kind of reaction will just fizzle out shortly. It’s like a showy firework only. It cannot stand the test of reason. It cannot cope with the demands of truth and justice.

We are still in Lent. Perhaps, this thorny issue is meant to purify us further. We need to see this whole affair within the context of our faith and beliefs, using it to nourish our ascetical life and sharpen our sense of duty to evangelize forcefully but always in truth and charity.