The collective gasps and shrieks of protest counter-slapping the Commission on Elections Second Division’s Bible and Koran-calling coup de grace to the application for accreditation in the Party-List system of Ang Ladlad have brought out of the closet the persistent and enduring foundational intercourse of the state to its sectarian and religious past. The Comelec took the easy way-out. By what any other way could the judges and arbiters of a modern organized society ground their indictment of an aggrupation of gay men for immorality other than reinscribing passages from the Bible and the Koran to the doctrinal page. Now that the Supreme Court has tiptoed into the fray by reverse mechanics—issuing a TRO against the Comelec for disqualifying Ang Ladlad and requiring the commission to treat the party as qualified while the Court is still appraising the propriety of the party’s dis-qualification—most will again be one in judicial forecasting and in parroting in all pompousness that our republican and post-religious colonial temperament forbids us any longer to situate legal norms in religious dogma and motivations. All will be undone by the Supreme Court and all should be well.
The utter reliance of the aged commissioners on overtly religious expressions to legitimize a legal construct could not just be simply brushed aside as factored by senility and antiquarian sensibilities as the gay-men have assiduously offered the tri-media as the totality of their party’s discourse. The commissioners could not be faulted; they were just too astute for their own good and their conventional reticence merely mirrored the rhetorical and textual underpinnings of a legal framework built upon the secular frontage of its modern American upbringing while forever locked in poisoned embrace with its Spanish religious colonial past. This confused temperament is not an anomaly. It has floundered and stood the test of a century as a healthy compromise. This legal equivocation authored the mélange of antinomian ideals and textual contradictions pervasive in our political and legal substructures. The 1987 Constitution, the latest of its three incarnations and the fountain from which mouth the many stabs at non-sectarianism gush forth, plays the biggest host to this antinomian scandal and justices, jurists, judges and arbiters play along, paying lip-services and rolling just as confused.
The project of secularism and the secularization of the legal system were derivatives of the country’s commitment to American constitutionalism and, as adopted and mimicked in this jurisdiction, were at once the evocative departure point away from the church-state interweave of the Spanish colonial regime. It was in a sense a dynamo of the country’s fêted transition from being theocratic to republican, from being a rampart of a religious colonial master of the past to a parapet of a secular super-country of the 20th century. The non-establishment and free exercise clauses formed the core of this notional shift. These twin pledges of constitutional secularism traversed constitutional evolution and have stood glinting in the 1987 Freedom Constitution as they were so worded a century back. They were there for everyone to see and as makeshift shrines to pay reverence to the modern deities of liberty, freedom and equality.
Ranged to the verbose remainder of the supreme law of the land, the textual guarantees of constitutional secularism, however, fall flat and cannot transcend their formalist breadth. Inceptively, the Constitution strongly decrees the inviolability of the separation of the church and the state. This positive language on a negative concept (the disengagement of what was once a cohesive scheme) aside, the Constitution, in fact, unfurls into a thought parade of carefully planted provisos and riders on how the state still divines a system of God-belief when public good and general welfare seem not apt or too boring perhaps to legitimize a constitutional articulation. The Constitution treads light in these dubious utterances by keeping awfully silent—not bothering to institute reinforcement provisions beside and adjacent to lest their theological anchor juts our for attention—and by letting them lie harmlessly enough. The layered surface, however, easily tapers off even by the most cursory of glances.
The Preamble, the foreword-distillation of the beliefs and aspirations of the Filipino people, prefaced the Constitution by a volte-face of its republican and democratic ideals by directly, openly and straightforwardly pre-positioning the collective aims of the authors to an Almighty God. If the Constitution really adheres to the tenets of republicanism and democracy, the direct reference to an Almighty God was an undue conscription of the atheists and non-theists to the God-believing Filipino people at the risk of being left out in the cold, un-Filipino and without a country to call their own. The Preamble rams to the feeble obverses of a state brandishing a civic-secular front a communal requirement of imploring the aid of an Almighty God before one can be made a subject of the supreme law of the land. Either the Constitution is by and for the God-believing Filipinos only or it is really prefaced to provide accommodation to the verity that more than half of the Filipinos are into God-belief of a monotheist orientation. Either that or otherwise, it runs afoul of the constitutional commitment to secularism.
While indeed the Preamble does not proffer constitutional rights, it set the mood to the underhanded introduction of textual reiterations of the Church-State interlace in the constitution. The present Constitution is littered with these textual anomalies. Article II, § 12 which in half a sentence imports an antiabortion clause, rejects Roe v. Wade by mandating state protection for the life of the unborn from conception. By affording protection to the life of the unborn from conception concedes the point that there is life thereabouts and that therefore it is a legal person. This is a worldview which traces support only from theological and sectarian credos. The Constitution without grounding this imperative to a civic-secular discourse proceeded to adopt a religious norm—one that is largely of Catholic origin—and put it deep in the haze of principles on family life and good parenting. If it can only find legitimization in a theological assumption, this state policy certainly renders a textual contradiction to the constitutional principle of state-church disengagement.
Delving further, Article VI, §28 (3) ups the ante in textual incongruity by so declaring as a constitutional verity that religious properties along with those of educational and charitable institutions, are exempted from taxes.
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