Wednesday, April 23, 2008 Carvajal: Not gender but status bias By Orlando P. Carvajal Break Point
JAN-JAN' humiliation at the hands of government doctors is not a case of gender bias for the fact is we have gay people in high offices of government and they are respected. We also have gay persons in business who are up there in the social ladder and are getting their due respect. We even have gay priests and religious who might be made fun of privately but are never humiliated publicly.
Jan-Jan’s humiliation stemmed more from an anti-poor bias than from a gender bias in Philippine society. Gender bias aggravated it but the principal cause of his humiliation was his social status as poor. He didn’t look like anybody important and he came to a government hospital. That marks him as poor, somebody who is not likely to complain however he is treated.
To be sure, anti-poor bias exists in varying degrees in other countries. It also exists in varying degrees in the private sector in this country. But government bureaucracy has gained uncommon notoriety in being anti poor, for being irresponsible and insensitive to ordinary citizens yet servile to the rich and socially well-placed. You can be as gay as gay can be but if you have money nobody will ever dare ridicule you publicly. On the other hand, you can be as straight as straight can be sexually but if you are poor you are definitely a potential victim of official irresponsibility and insensitivity.
Senior citizens are another case in point. We honor and respect only the senior citizens who have achieved a certain social status in life. The poor ones are left to their own devices to survive their senior years. All you have to do is observe how government bureaucrats order the feeble and poor senior citizens around when they go to a government office for some service, after making them stay in line for hours on end.
In an earlier column I wrote about my cousin’s death from a killer’s gun. But because he was poor no government official has moved a finger to give his family the right to an investigation and solution of the murder. If he were a person of distinction, the government would have spared no effort, including fat rewards, for the killer’s capture.
The other day a security guard broke his head and died when his bicycle bumped a slab of cement that was left irresponsibly by a government worker on the road. I guess since only a poor man died, I saw when I looked the following afternoon that the cement slab was still there, waiting for its next victim. If it was an important person’s car that just got dented by it, the same would have been removed already.
The gender bias is also there but it is the more fundamental anti-poor bias of Philippine society that is simply appalling. There’s proof of it all around.
