A quick trip to the comment's section in every website bearing Laude's case gave me the uninvited chills that ran down my spine and settled in my gut-- as if something as ghastly as Filipino stupidity is ever so welcome. I can understand it when people feel uncomfortable-- more like, DISGUSTED--with the idea of transgender individuals living among us. I understand them NOT because I sympathize with the ICK! factor they got, but because, I had known what it was like to believe that human beings, and God, have a contract between them-- a sort of business wherein the employee is strictly under the boss whether the employee likes the situation or not.
In a heated debate between American Catholic League president Bill Donohue and Irish journalist and atheist Christopher Hitchens, Donohue said that the freedom God has intended for us is the freedom to do what you OUGHT to do.
The usage of modal OUGHT in a sentence implies something has to be done out of duty. Now one may think that OUGHT tells us to do something regardless of our inkling with that which ought to be done. In other words, as Donohue put it in the context of the debate, we do not have that much choice BUT to obey God since that would keep us from harm-- absolute obedience to God gives us the free pass into heaven.
Well, here are the problems in that assertion: (A) That, to say God created us for absolute obedience means we have no freewill to question God Himself. (B) That, to accept (A) we have to act based on OUGHTs, since we can not question God about it (C) And, since we have to base our actions on OUGHTs because God requires it and we can never question it from the basis that God requires absolute obedience then (D) we basically have no freewill-- we are merely acting on a memo sent down from the heavens and to fail to act on it means eternal hell.
I am not an atheist (as one can tell from this blog), but I do get what Christopher Hitchens make of God out of Donohue's assertion: that God is not a loving God, He is a tyrant worth rebelling against--- if, according to Hitchens, God were true. Because, we have to understand; nothing pisses off an atheist like having their personal freedoms curtailed by a cosmic bogeyman.
In the light of the recent murder of Jennifer Laude (the transgender individual slain by American Pfc. Joseph Scott Pemberton), Donohue's meaning for God and life is pretty much the meaning given by many Filipinos. When the news of Jennifer's murder came out in the open, Filipinos were quick to blame the victim: Jennifer Laude had it coming.
Because Jennifer Laude, like any individual who 'failed' to be linear, was destined to die-- and to avoid this kind of death, one must fall in line with linearity, and march along.
The sad thing about the case is Jennifer Laude was automatically dubbed as Bayot Salot not surprisingly, by rigorously uptight so-called Bible believers. And as a pejorative, I dub them Bible thumpers-- they would very much believe in two things: 1. In their own understanding of the Bible and 2. In unfounded conspiracies-- a deadly mix. For them, Jennifer Laude stopped being human the moment she rejected her gender assigned by birth and strove to be female. For them, being heterosexual is the ultimate benchmark, or at least, one of the many requirements to get into heaven. It's like earning points in a test, you know; you get to choose which items will be easier for you to get the highest mark. And for many Filipinos, forget the complexities of human psychology and sexuality because it's bull, it's waaay easier to believe that our genitals are solely for procreation and that being straight means you're capable of squeezing your way in into the narrow gates of heaven.
In the gospels and the entire Bible, our sexual identity never made it to the cut of the list of Jesus's "requirements":
1. Love the Lord God with all our mind, with all our soul, with all our heart, and with all our strength. (Deuteronomy 6:5, Matthew 22:37)
2. Love our neighbors as we love ourselves. (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:39)
3. Please God with our faith (Psalms 51: 16-17, Hebrews 11:6)
4. Make our faith alive through good works or corporal acts of mercy. (Genesis 22, James 2:14-26)
5. "Negative freedoms" or even moral excesses should be avoided because it harms not only us but also others. (Sirach ch 6, 1 Corinthians ch. 6)
Many Filipinos do not want "complexities". We want to have things easy: instead of language, we want jejemon or FB stickers, instead of wealth distribution and economics, we want DAP, instead of livelihood and stable jobs, we want cash transfers.
Complexities require paradoxes; we do not want to live in paradoxes. The Bible tells us that "anyone who tries to save his life shall lose it; anyone who loses his life shall save it". In one verse, the Bible tells us that Jesus Christ came in peace, in the next , it tells us that Jesus Christ came to cause division by the sword. Ultimately, the paradoxes are edifying and salvific: because instead of having us shrink into the darkness, Christ's person (a living paradox) pulls us close into research: what could those incongruities mean? How can those seemingly illogical verses mean anything but illogical? Or does the Bible, more importantly, the Gospel, mirror the psycho-spiritual state of our broken Imago Dei? Perhaps, Jesus Christ tells us to live through our grand oxymoron design, to bear this shameful and anomalous Cross, so that we can be in full communion with the Trinity.
Filipinos do not want to have spiritual and mind exercises: most of us are content with what the local media tells us. For all the barrage of station IDs all claiming that their own TV stations, one is the true bastion of truth, the others aren't, the very soul of these crony capitalistic monsters are soap operas, telenovelas, Koreanovelas. Each story tells the bland and uniform ideals that can be bent and re-cast: girl is in despair, a prince charming arrives; prince charming is a bad boy with strings of girlfriends and FUBUs, desperate princess is a virginal good girl then she helps this stupid bad boy who doesn't seem to know what's good or bad for him. Then we also have the used and tired TV trope of a rich-bitch kontrabida versus a poor-saintly bida. And we ask ourselves, why do we have trash Filipino attitude and thinking?
We want the comfort linear, black-and-white, monolithic, conformity brings: like a dog returning to its vomit and then consuming it because it can't devour anything else more nourishing than acid reflexes.
Unfortunately most Filipinos have adopted this "monolithic" thinking into playing Sherlock Holmes; how deplorable the idea is. The legendary, fictional character draws out his deductions based on the evidences presented to him using a variety of unorthodox practices; sometimes voodoo, like astrophysics or alchemy, even astrology. And this "variety" has helped him solved many cases, not to mention Watson.
Filipinos lack "variety"-- the Laude case, and thousands of other sexual/assault crimes, amplifies this. The tendency to blame the victim in sexual crimes stems from the old and rehashed prejudice of "wives provoked their husbands to beat them". What these Filipinos fail to see is that we are now living in a world more mind-boggling than it was before. So the framework of husbands justified in maiming their wives out of jealousy needs to be put to rest. Today, we are seeing men (gay or straight) victimized in an abusive relationship. It seems scales are finally falling off from their eyes. They can now look at evidences siding with the victims. Funny, this has only happened when we found out that men can be victims too: why is this a trend? How come men are justified to be portrayed as authentic victims, at the receiving end, while women victims are treated as the "source" of domestic violence? I see this pattern also in the Jennifer Laude case.
Monolithic, quasi-religious "Christian Taliban" Filipinos (and some atheists who believe in Scientism and rejects the reality of complexity) found Jennifer Laude as a sort of a freaky evil leprechaun who had tricked the dashing, handsome, but naive Pfc. Pemberton. However, if one follows the news, saw the available CCTV footage, it seems the roles had been reversed: now we have a transgender dead and the case could not be simply VFA, but it could also be a "hate crime" regardless of Pemberton's motives for killing Jennifer Laude.
Given that Jennifer Laude was born male, and she chose to be female (according to reports, she had breast implants and indeed had gender reassignment), the chances of victim-blaming was high. Bear in mind that in the culturally-induced naivete of Filipinos, a woman is a "play thing" or a "property"-- in the master-slave dynamic of heterosexual relationships, the man (in this case, Pemberton), has all the power to do as he pleases. Therefore, if the plaything (Laude, now a woman) has done something wrong, or something displeasing to the master, and when the master physically "punishes" her, he is right to do so; the woman has no choice but to accept her fate.
Thus, I am not surprised (though it made me feel like punching someone) that Filipinos saw Jennifer Laude as "the wife who provoked her husband into beating her". On the other hand, these poop-brain Filipinos rallied behind Pemberton and actually hailed him as a hero! Not only because he is an American soldier (We've been taught by our American colonizers that they are our liberators), but also because he had successfully wiped out an LGBT member, a BAYOT SALOT.
Prejudices arise when we opt for a black and white TV tube instead of a technicolor diorama. We have to begin practicing accepting the fact that people are as diverse as the stones found in the beach sand, unconditional love and perfect justice are the key to help us get along. This the paradox of life: our unity relies not on uniformity, but on understanding diversity and finding a way how to make us fit into one together.
