Late reaction to HTT's post on Rizal, and the RH bill, and the Church

Click here for HTT's Rizals-Noli-characters-today

I remember being required to read the Noli Me Tangere and the El Filibusterismo at Sayans.  

If i remember right, our teacher was Mrs. Alfonso and we were supposed to read it in Pilipino, Mrs. Alfonso being the Filipino teacher in .... my first year. i was in Neptune and Mrs. Evaline Gerochi was our adviser.

i have not read both novels in its original form - Spanish.  i basically read the English version. Yes, i know - we were supposed to read it in Pilipino but if i had read it in Pilipino, it would have taken 3x as long to finish it as reading the English version and i figured, both were translations anyway.  It was the culture at the time, in grade school i was class monitor and a class monitor, if you didnt know it, was required to report classmates who spoke Pilipino.  it was an assigned thing, so i remember speaking Pilipino with another class monitor, as we would not report each other.  but i digress.

Padre Damaso. My dear male classmates  would snicker (do adult males still snicker the way they do in high school?) in recall of the person they associate with Damaso.  Damaso was a DOM although like Padre Salvi, he once was a young man.  And those Padres were certainly lusty ones, and rapists practically.

Rizal's portrayal of the Church was decadent and evil, a case of power corrupts and absolute power corrupts completely.

i am Catholic.  i practice my faith and live it as joyously as i can.  i have never believed that as an institution that it was perfect.  God is perfect but his servants are not although some come perilously close to it.  Man is fallible, God is not.  

HTT talks about the Church and its errors.  one of the errors, he states is that the Church tried to kill off the mandatory Rizal subject in high school and if the Church had been successful, the Filipino people would have been deprived of the knowledge that Rizal had tried to impart with his writings.  He repeats the thought in the recent RH bill voting and how the Church condemns its passing into law.

I have very good friends who stand fast in opposing views.  Diane and Kay, real sisters in the flesh and not just in spirit are both against the RH bill.  Just as steadfast are Amihan and Alice in the opposing stand.  and i?  i believe in choices - for as long as these are choices freely made - not stuffed down one's throat.  

Amihan's work deals with abused children.  she has seen directly what unwanted children can be forced to experience, to be sold for pleasure at a tender age.  she has seen wives get beaten is they do not lie with their husbands who take zero precautions and are macho in their prolific creation of children they do not support.  i would rather that these women not have to bear the burden of more children in addition to the lusty rampages of their erstwhile husbands.

so yes, you could say i am not against the RH bill.  my friend Dale reminds me that her objection is the big business that will be generated by the bill - as clinics hand anti-reproduction materials willy-nilly.

but i say - to each his own conscience.  and i hate censorship - in all its forms.