The voice of the people is the voice of God

One of the CBCP’s most cherished arguments against the RH bill is that the government should follow “Catholic Values” because the majority of the people of Filipinos are Catholic. Of course, these said Catholic Values include the rejection of access to artificial contraceptive methods. How this Catholic Value has been privately revealed to the Catholic Church hierarchy is a somewhat questionable issue. Whether their reasoning holds up to scrutiny or not, what they are saying with this argument is that the state should follow the Catholic Church hierarchy because they speak for all the Catholics in the country, which are the majority. Now I don’t know about you, but I really do not like somebody taking the liberty of speaking on my behalf without my permission.

Obviously, to use the “catholic country” approach is a to use a flawed argument. Even when we allow the CBCP their assumption that they speak for all Catholics, that’s no reason to deny access to reproductive health care to Non-Catholics. After all, it’s not like people are being forced to use condoms and IUDs. Should the right of the Catholics (as the CBCP thinks them) to reject artificial contraceptives trump over the responsibility of the government to give holistic health care to the Atheists, Agnostics, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, various Protestant sects, and followers of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? No matter how small a percentage these groups are compared to the majority, they are still citizens of the Philippines. Why shouldn’t the CBCP just encourage their followers to shun these services, rather than denying their access to everybody else?

But for them to be so assured as to claim to speak for the entire Catholic population is another shocking thing entirely. On what grounds do they base this assertion? We can look at the possible reasons that they might have and see if they hold up to scrutiny.