Sex vs God in the Philippines (Asia Times Online)

Written for and published by Asia Times Online on July 21, 2010. Click here for the original article
Sex vs God in the Philippines 
By Jennee Grace U Rubrico

MANILA - Armin Luistro is embroiled in a fierce debate between church and state. As the Philippines education secretary, it's his job to steer government plans to introduce sex education into elementary and high schools in the predominantly Catholic nation.
Since announcing last month that he planned to review the program, Luistro, a member of the De La Salle Brothers - a group of full-time religious educators who are not priests - has sought to distance himself from a longstanding issue that is putting politically powerful church leaders at loggerheads with the government for the second time in five years, saying it is not his priority.
As in a similar tie-up between the department and the United Nations Population Fund in 2005 - which was suspended at its pilot stage - the government again finds itself at odds with the politically powerful Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), which wields enormous influence, including the formulation of national policies. While Luistro has yet to decide on the future of the program, he has met with church leaders, whose stance on the issue is clear.
"The position of the CBCP even before is that it [sex education] should be left to parents, especially if we are talking about children who are underage," CBCP spokesman Pedro Quitorio III said.
Spearheaded by the Education Department, the government's initiative aims to teach students about health, wellness, values and character development through modules that include discussions on the human reproductive system, parts of the body and puberty. As planned by the previous Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration, sex education is to be integrated in subjects including geography, history and civics and mathematics, with the church's position on pre-marital sex included alongside data on pre-marital sex, teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.
In a memorandum detailing the focus of the earlier program, the Education Department stressed the need for sex education by pointing out that 71.1% of young females and 35.7% of young males reported contracting genital diseases. It had also noted a 5% rise in early unprotected sex between 1994 and 2002, as well as a lack of adequate knowledge among adolescents to prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
To address those matters, the Education Department had pushed for "more specific and focused topics", including safe motherhood, fertility awareness, misconceptions and myths on family planning methods, and adolescent reproductive health, and for parent-child counseling. The revived program was scheduled to be pilot tested this year in 79 public secondary schools and eight elementary schools across the country.
The church is not without its backers since about 82% of country's 90 million people are Roman Catholic. The Education Department now faces a lawsuit filed on behalf of 30 parents who oppose the sex education plan for allegedly promoting “contraceptive imperialism” that assaults Christian sensibilities and values.
The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a political force that claims to be fighting for the right of Muslims in the Philippines, has also joined the fray. "This is like preparing the child to be competitive for the next world of sex," said Sheikh Muhammad Muntassir, head of the MILF Da'wah committee, who also added that the policy was "hastily designed" and did not consider child psychology.
The Education Department has for the last month been firefighting, giving out interviews and issuing press statements to defend the program. In an attempt to manage the backlash, former education secretary Mona Valisno clarified that "classroom discussions on sex education [are] not about the sex act but on the science of reproduction, physical care and hygiene, correct values and the norms of inter-personal relationships to avoid pre-marital sex and teenage pregnancy.
"Our role here is to educate our young people on issues that directly affect them and empower them to make informed choices and decisions," Valisno said, adding the modules were prepared by psychologists "to ensure that specific topics for discussions will be made in the appropriate year levels".
She admitted, however, that it would be up to the new administration to decide on the implementation or scrapping of the contested project. Many take a pragmatic stance, citing the dismal results of the country's population control drive to argue their point. Now the twelfth-most populous country in the world, the Philippines has a population that grows at a rate of 1.96% per year.
Of its 90 million people, 40% are aged 14 years old and below. East Timor is the only Southeast Asian country that has a faster population growth rate, at 2.03%. Indonesia, the world's fourth-most populous country, has a population growth rate of 1.14% per year, while China and India, the two most populous countries in the world, see their population grow yearly by 0.66% and 1.55% respectively.
"Personally, this is not a moral issue. Whether we should follow the church's teaching, I don't agree. The situation is that the country needs to manage its population," said Donald Dee, vice chairman of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the country's largest business organization. "But when and how sex education should be taught is something that we leave to the child psychology experts."
Ramon Casiple, executive director of the Institute of Political and Electoral Reform, notes that population growth control is paramount, as a runaway population puts the country at risk of running out of resources.
"Having a big population has some advantages, like having a big labor pool, but there's a possibility that we would run out of food to feed our people," he said.
He raised the possibility that the name - the Adolescent Reproductive Health program - and approach of the initiative may have contributed to the conflict between the church and government. While acknowledging that the church as an institution was not likely to change its position, Casiple said he still believed that the program had a good chance of survival.
Luistro's move to review the program, he said, would open up discussion and debate. He added that even within the church, the sex education initiative enjoyed some support.
"The beauty of having a cabinet [in government] is that issues can be discussed and resolved by consensus. The country needs to manage its population, and most likely, the [government's position] will be leaning towards reproductive health, including sex education," he said.
Jennee Grace U Rubrico has been a journalist for over 10 years.