Carvajal: Tread lightly

IT IS as old as the human race but up until recently the fight for gender equality was by woman. Yet, while woman’s equality with man has steadily gone many notches higher her fight is far from over, even in the Philippines, the acknowledged leader in gender equality practice in this part of the world.

It took nations a long time to be enlightened on gender equality but for many women in the world it remains a dream. How long, then, will it now take man and woman to accept that lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender and queers (LGBTQ) are their equals in dignity and rights as humans?

Senator Risa Hontiveros is right the Sogie (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and Expression) equality bill is urgent. However, it is a more complex issue than women’s gender equality that rushing it might be counter-productive. Legislation did not make gender equality a reality for women. It was slow and painstaking education on gender equality that made man finally legislate for it.

Nothing more expeditious can be expected of the LGBTQ’s fight for gender equality. If you advert to the passion that goes with the diverse religious and moral reasons against it (homosexuality a sin and un-natural?) and with some extreme demands of advocates for it (like no sex on birth certificate?), you can easily see that undue rush will most likely produce half-baked legislation that would only exacerbate people’s fears and with disastrous results.

The devil is in the emotional, cultural, and moral details of the bill as the basic principles subsuming gender equality for LGBTQ’s are fairly straightforward. All humans, any way they crumble in nature (man, woman, LGBTQ) are God’s creation. If so, we are all good as God’s handiwork and, therefore, equal in dignity and rights.

Unfortunately, the Catholic religion that is supposed to champion the equality of all God’s children is proving to be the toughest barrier gender equality advocates have to hurdle. The religion’s high priests claim they speak for God when they refuse women the right, for instance, to become priests and when they equivocate in their stand on homosexuality. They then impose “God’s will” on the Catholic faithful that include legislators who, less for the religious than for the political reason of catering to votes, will of course bow to “God’s will.”

We are all either God’s creation or not. If so, then we are equal in dignity and rights regardless of sex. If not, if some of us are not God’s creation, hence morally evil as feared by anti gender equality advocates, then pray tell, who created LGBTQ’s? Only a correct answer will enable us to work the devil out of the details.

We are clearly on sacred ground. It is best to tread lightly.

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