A truly critical test

In that forum where Senator Panfilo Lacson announced his support for family planning and explicitly endorsed measures medieval minds doctrinally oppose, much attention was diverted to the issue of whether the senator would or would not run for the presidency in 2004. (Several newspapers actually bannered his alleged declaration to seek the presidency, an announcement people within Senator Lacson’s group say he never made in the said forum.) This diversion is unfortunate because the focus of public discussion shifted from a critical national issue to one that largely turned on the senator’s individual and political worth.

Consequently, in the days that followed, several prominent personalities reflecting the full range of the country’s political spectrum – from the aboveground left to the midground liberal and the interrable right – spoke mainly of the senator and his presidential credentials. His views regarding family planning were consigned to second place in these highly emotional, often obscurantist commentaries.

Family planning is one of those motherhood statements every one now identifies with. Its crucial test has to be whether the one expressing support for it is indeed intelligently and seriously supportive of family planning. Family planning’s crucial test also has to do with whether an individual or group preaching it assumes people are generally sane, endowed with sufficient reason and a sense of responsibility, and, consequently, might be presented a range of choices on how to undertake their family planning effectively.

People who do not subscribe to these assumptions go for a straitjacket version of family planning. They limit the citizenry to singular choices that neither science nor human psychology indicates as being historically effective or convincingly practical. In coercing people to subscribe to a most procrustean version of family planning, these proponents serve the interest of intelligent population management with their lips and hardly ever with effective action. (As a matter of fact, their publicly most preferred method of family planning is better understood as one whose practitioners are known as parents, even more precisely as parents who abet our population’s rapid and irresponsible multiplication rather than its optimized addition and responsible growth.)

Political leaders in this country have a long tradition of deliberately failed leadership where family planning is concerned. On this crucial issue, practically all of our politicians have avoided confronting the challenge of what it takes politically and technically to manage an explosively growing Philippine population. Most presidents, senators, congressmen and congresswomen, mayors and other public officials have preferred to keep silent on this national concern or to piously recite convenient litanies that ensure continuing political support from medievally-minded influential sectors.

There have been significant exceptions. A former president, a current senator who like Senator Lacson is formally aligned with the opposition, several members of the House of Representatives – two of them women with impressively progressive track records – and a few others have dared to publicly announce their support for serious family planning for Filipinos. All of them have known how to confront sectoral forces which promised to treat them as dark forces and predictably demonized them in local and national elections.

They won their electoral contests and are among the better regarded political figures in the country. The primary reason for their political victories is the refusal of most Filipinos now to be dictated by institutional leaders who have lost much of their confidence, in whom they no longer repose the most critical of political resources — trust. Competent national surveys in the last ten years show that neither institutional endorsement nor institutional blacklisting has been a decisive factor in Philippine elections.

The reason is obvious. Enough Filipinos no longer think it proper to manage the country’s contemporary challenges with technologies and biases which were not functional even for the Dark Ages that spawned them. Traditional dark and grey eminences and their minions are increasingly unable to channel the political choices of our citizens who desert the dark in ever larger numbers and willfully move towards progressive illumination.

In the next elections, our more intelligent and patriotic politicians will find it easier to be progressive. The year 2004 is indeed going to be remembered, but probably not for the electoral outcome benighted authorities now threaten progressive candidates with. It will be memorable precisely because a critical political test shall have been passed by the electorate of this country as well as those they choose to lead them. Probably with flying colors, as people are wont to say.