A very 'Happy Valentine's Day' to our readers

First, allow me to greet our readers a “Happy Valentine’s Day”. Today is what we call “Love Day” and we hope and pray that our people would express their love to their families, their spouses, relations, but above all, our love for God which is embodied as the first commandment in the Ten Commandments and in what our Lord Jesus Christ gave us as the greatest of all commandments, which is found on Matt. 22-36 “To Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

Too many of us, including this writer, have for many years given eros (human love) more importance on Valentine’s Day than agape (the love of God) too much emphasis. But only a renewed Catholic would understand what I’m talking about. So today, people will crowd the hotels and motels to celebrate Love Day in a physical way. But someday, they will discover that the Love of God is more important than life itself. Happy Valentines to you.

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Another American music icon, Whitney Houston has died at a ripe young age of 48 years old, at the Beverly Hills Hotel possibly of drug overdose, just on the eve of the Grammy Awards. Houston’s death follows the untimely death of another music icon Michael Jackson who died in June 2009. How many more American celebrities would die before the US government does something about this drug problem?

Elvis Presley, Jim Morrison, Marilyn Monroe, John Belushi, Judy Garland, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and even Bruce Lee just to name a few. There is no question that if these celebrities did not take drugs illegal or otherwise, they would have lived to a ripe old age. Alas their popularity or celebrity status somehow gets into their heads and they believe that only drugs can give them some kind of relief, which in the end destroy their careers and kill them.

The world media is no help either. Instead of making these celebrities become a pariah or a social outcast, their drug abuse make them more famous. I guess it is time to change tactics… that old bumper sticker that declared, “Jail the pusher, spare the user” just doesn’t work anymore.

I dare say that it is time to accept the reality that it is the user that creates the demand for illicit drugs, which is why underground pushers continue to send them all over the world, many through mules, like those Filipinos executed in China and many others. When will America realize that they must change their tactics and fight drug abuse by stopping the user create more demand for these dangerous drugs.

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I’ve been keenly watching the Republican nomination race and I was amazed that Rick Santorum has caught up with Mitt Romney. If you didn’t know, Santorum is a conservative Catholic and Mitt Romney is a Mormon and this coming Presidential battle will pit the Liberals vs the conservatives.

Of special interest for us Filipinos was last week’s big news in the United States when US Catholic leaders came out to fight the Obama administration’s “Obamacare” or health care reform using pastoral letters decrying the government’s decision to require religiously affiliated hospitals, charity organizations, colleges or universities to offer insurance coverage for contraception, sterilization and the “morning after pill” to their employees. These are requirement that the Catholic Church totally opposes.

We can only second-guess that this has happened perhaps because the US Catholic Church made a feeble opposition when the US version of the Reproductive Health (RH) bill was passed… now they are suffering the consequences of that law passed by the Democrats under President Barack Obama.

This is why the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) is vehemently fighting to stop the proposed RH Bill in Congress because what happened in the United States last week can very well happen here if, God forbid, the RH bill is passed.

As Michael Brendan Dougherty of Business Insider quipped, US Catholic leaders are “fighting mad with the Obama administration and they’re taking the fight to the pews.”

So for us Lay Catholics, we urged the CBCP to bring this fight to the pews while it’s still being cooked in Congress, because we just got a preview of things to come if the Aquino regime would pass the RH bill. Meanwhile Pres. Obama sensing a huge loss in Catholic votes backtracked, saying that he will let the insurance companies pay for this… but the US Bishops insist that would still be paid by the American taxpayers.

Call me blessed that I was able to have the eminent Dr. Judith Reisman, PhD, as guest on my TV show. She singlehandedly debunked the so-called scientific studies of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, the father of the Sexual Revolution, for using pedophiles in sex experiment even with four-year-old children. I will be writing more on Dr. Reisman’s work in my future columns.

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For email responses to this article, write to [email protected]or [email protected]. His columns can be accessed through http://www.philstar.com