Gay-bashing by Comelec Bullies

From the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

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By Raul Pangalangan

THE ELECTION commissioners belong to homo sapiens, yet they are so homogeneous in their homophobia that they might think I have actually insulted them by using any word that can pass for a homonym. By the Comelec’s backward logic, anything homo can’t be good.

What amazes me is the gall of Nicodemo Ferrer, Lucenito Tagle and Elias Yusuph in citing the Bible and the Koran to curtail a right of political participation guaranteed by the Constitution. What was going on inside their heads? Were they brown-nosing the fundamentalist clergy of both religions? Were they pandering to the hardy machos in the gallery? Or could they actually have been serious in rejecting the gay and lesbian rights party-list group Ang Ladlad?

The Constitution says it loud and clear. “The separation of Church and State shall be inviolable.” “No religious test shall be required for the exercise of civil or political rights.” Yet the Comelec cites the Bible where it condemns “vile affections” which, this time citing the Koran, are punished with a “shower of brimstone.” These constitute precisely the “religious test” barred by the Constitution.

What is appalling is these were completely superfluous to the Comelec’s logic, which, in the end, actually relied on secular morality. The Comelec said that Ang Ladlad “serve[d] no other purpose but to satisfy the market for … lust or pornography … offend[s a] race or religion” and are “offensive to morals.” They took one look at Ang Ladlad’s openness to “intimate and sexual relations [among] individuals of a different gender, of the same gender, or more than one gender” and concluded that Ang Ladlad “advocate[s] immoral doctrines.” But where does it say that the Comelec commissioners can use the law to carry out their private prejudices?

The Comelec concluded that Ang Ladlad lied when it said that none of its supposedly gay nominees “have [not] violated … laws, rules or regulations relating to elections.” I wonder: Since when has the “Kamasutra” been an election-related manual? Philippine elections are so lewd that the “Kamasutra” can only be so profaned. But seriously now. What laws did Ang Ladlad breach? What was the charge? Who was the complainant? What court rendered judgment? Can the Comelec so blithely arrogate unto itself the role of accuser, judge and executioner?

When the Comelec hears an application for party-list accreditation, it is limited to specific legal tests and nothing more. Is the group genuinely not part of the government? Is the group a mere front of religious groups otherwise excluded from forming political parties? Does a Forbes Park matron belong to the purportedly marginalized minority of homeowners’ associations? Does the group represent a bona fide “marginalized and under-represented group”? Indeed, for the 2007 elections, the Comelec disqualified Ang Ladlad because it couldn’t show that it had enough muscle as a nationwide party. Now that Ang Ladlad has apparently shown some political bicep, why does the Comelec suddenly want to poke into its other parts?

Granting that the Comelec truly has a “roving commission” as our moral guardian, why did they discover it only now that the gay and lesbians stand before them? For instance, shouldn’t they have first disqualified Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo from public office because she immorally spoke to a Comelec commissioner during the 2004 elections? Shouldn’t they disqualify that Comelec commissioner who immorally answered when Ms Arroyo said, “Hello, Garci”? Shouldn’t they disqualify retired Maj. Gen. (now party-list congressman) Jovito Palparan? After all the Supreme Court no less, speaking through the Chief Justice in a writ of amparo decision, documented Palparan’s interrogating two torture victims who were almost “disappeared”? Did the Comelec even bother to investigate the Court’s finding that its Mega-Pacific computerization deal had violated its own bidding rules?

Why the selective application of rules? One set of rules but two ways to apply them: liberal in favor of the politically well connected, strict against the political outsiders? The Constitution frowns upon unequal treatment, especially when it burdens constitutionally protected rights of political participation, of speech, of assembly, or of privacy.

The Comelec cannot push Ang Ladlad around. But gays and lesbians have lived a whole lifetime of standing up to bullies, of fighting off the daily insults, the deprecating attitudes, the nasty jokes. They are veterans of a different kind of war, and for them, the commissioners are, metaphorically, small nuts to chew.

The US Supreme Court called for exacting judicial scrutiny when “prejudice against discrete and insular minorities [curtail] those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities.” The Comelec gay exclusion fits that description to a T.

The US high court reasoned: “Only the most willful blindness could obscure the fact that sexual intimacy is a sensitive, key relationship of human existence [and that we] define themselves in a significant way through [our] intimate sexual relationships … [M]uch of the richness of a relationship will come from the freedom of an individual to choose the form and nature of these intensely personal bonds.” Ferrer has threatened to out the closet gays in Congress, but he merely succeeded in outing himself as a closet fascist.

It is no surprise when weak political institutions like the Comelec ally themselves with powerful religious orthodoxies. That is the way of bullies, typical of the authoritarian impulse to kowtow before the powerful while riding roughshod over the weak. The “kiss-ass, kick-ass” syndrome is especially ridiculous here since the only behind the Comelec must cover is its own.
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This is probably the best article I've read about this issue and I can't think of anything to add to this.