The Rainbow Blog Philippines

Ricky Reyes, Couples faction back Villar Fascinating discussion of which Presidential candidate is really "progay" and the influence of Ang Ladlad and gay political movements. By Jerome Aning, Michael Lim Ubac Philippine Daily Inquirer Posted date: April 29, 2010 MANILA, Philippines—For their pro-life and pro-family stand, presidential candidates Manny Villar of the Nacionalista Party and John Carlos “JC” de los Reyes of Ang Kapatiran Party have received the indirect endorsement of a faction of Couples for Christ (CFC), a Catholic charismatic and renewal group. Villar also got the endorsement of a group of hairdressers, but not the Ang Ladlad, a party-list group of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender, which is supporting his main rival, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III. Asked by reporters about Ang Ladlad supporting Aquino, well-known hair stylist Ricky Reyes, said: “Kaya ngayon, nilaladlad ko na si Manny Villar (So now I’m disclosing my support for Manny Vil...

"The doctrine of the separation of the Church and State was not enunciated by a king or a president, or by a pope or a bishop, but by our Lord Jesus Himself. While our Lord was still in this world, there were those who wanted to show Him up as a false prophet, so they went to Him and asked whether they should pay the taxes demanded by the Roman government or not. Thereupon Jesus asked them to and Him a coin; upon receiving it, He asked them whose face was it that appeared on the coinl and they answered it was Caesar's. Jesus then said: "Render unto Caeser what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's." [Matt 22:15-22, Mark 12:13-17; Luke 20:20-26] (President Manuel L. Quezon at the Luneta, Manila 17 July 1938) For even more analysis of this issue, visit Sampaloc Toc's Render onto Comelec blog .

I am 24 years old.(Just celebrated my birthday a day ago) I know it’s not really a big deal since I’m relatively “young” but like what my friend said, it’s “the year” before I reach my quarter life (crisis?). This is of course in accordance to the assumption that I’ll live for 100 years. *fingers crossed* The cliché goes that age is but a number. Therefore, we shouldn’t really be bothered whether we are 16 or 60. While cleaning my closet this morning, I saw my super dusty math book (Hi Mr. Leithold!). If there is ONE thing that math taught me it would be the fact that numbers do matter. The ancient Greek philosopher, Pythagoras was right all along. Numbers are everything. Let me give a little exercise just to prove my point that numbers matter in this shithole of a world we live in. Let's begin with my so-called life. I've been living for more or less 8760 days or 210, 240 hours or 12, 614, 440 minutes or 756,864, 000 seconds! I have 1 sister and had a total of 34 pet do...

The High Court in Delhi ruled that the Indian penal code outlawing consensual sex between homosexual adults violates the right to life, privacy and dignity in the Indian Constitution. The Court cited the Yogyakarta Principles. The High Court in Delhi ruled that the Indian penal code outlawing consensual sex between homosexual adults violates the right to life, privacy and dignity in the Indian Constitution. The Court cited the Yogyakarta Principles. If you would like to read the historic 105 page judgment, it is available at the Times of India website . In addition to Indian case law, the Court's judgment cited numerous international treaties and other instruments as well as case law from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, South Africa, Hong Kong, and Nepal. The Yogyakarta principals were referred to as follows: Paragraph 43 (citation omitted): On 26th March, 2007, a group of human rights experts launched the Yogyakarta Principles on the A...

Book Review on Literature and Literary Theory Professor Emilio Bejel's book "Gay Cuban Nation". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Emilio Bejel is a Professor of Spanish American literature and literary theory at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He wrote Gay Cuban Nation . Before I get into the substance of this book, I was totally offended that the University of Chicago Press would print a book with so many fucking typographical errors! Shame! Shame! Shame! The first few chapters were very fascinating. I know almost nothing about Cuban literature or gay Cuban literary history so that was interesting in itself. However, what was more fascinating was Bejel's ability to weave Cuban national history into the framework of the "rupture" at the end of the nineteenth century / beginning of the twentieth century regarding sexuality. Nakpil Zialcita's comment about Philippine academic disregard for everything Spanis...

Book Review on Canadian English Professor Michael Cobb's book "God Hates Fags". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Happy Labor Day! Alexandra Chasin is an American professor of literature and LGBT studies. Chasin's book is a fascinating and damning account of how market forces have fundamentally altered (and destroyed in some ways) the revolutionary potential of LGBT movements. From the beginning (if there ever was one), LGBT movements have called for a fundamental rethinking of gender, family, and eros. In the U.S., until the 1990s, these movements were local and fragmented in nature, goals were similar but local LGBT groups dealt with local communities to tackle problems of discrimination, etc.,. Local bars funded local LGBT publications. As noted in Fetner's How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism , the direction of these movements in the U.S. became unified and nationalized in the 1980s. Fetner describe...

Book Review on Canadian English Professor Michael Cobb's book "God Hates Fags". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . I want to start off this review by unequivocally stating that I do not recommend buying or reading this book . I hesitated writing this review at first, but I decided I wanted to tell you what was so disappointing and my expectations for research into the discourse of anti-gay right-wing Christian fundamentalism. Michael Cobb is an English Professor at the University of Toronto and is a very angry gay man. I picked this book up with the idea that it would be an update to Didi Herman's The Anti-Gay Agenda with a focus on the upsurge in media attention to Fred Phelps "God Hates Fags" church. The book does provide a little bit of research into the history of Fred Phelps church of hate. However, I'd recommend Ryan Jones' documentary Fall from Grace -- which includes unprecedented access to Fred Ph...

Book Review on Literature and LGBT Studies Professor Julie Abraham's book "Metropolitan Lovers". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Julie Abraham is an American professor of literature and LGBT studies. Abraham's book is an interesting look at the connection between the idea of the "city" and homosexual identity -- lesbian and gay. I must admit up front that I found the book to be very Euro-American centric and failed to address the relation of the city and sexuality to colonialism and imperialism or test her theories of that relationship to the conscious city creating in colonized places. Because of this, I found a lot of the book boring and tedious to read. But, if you're into urban studies or European lesbian nineteenth century history or Oscar Wilde, you'll likely find this book much more interesting. That being said, the book got me thinking of Benedict Anderson's highly controversial Under Three Fla...

Book Review on American English Professor Michael Warner's book "The Trouble with Normal". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Michael Warner is a professor of English at Rutgers University. He is one of the founding thinkers in "queer theory" starting with his edited book Fear of a Queer Planet . When first published, The Trouble with Normal was seen as a response to Andrew Sullivan's book Virtually Normal and the move in sexual minority and dissident communities towards a stable LGBT identity community and same-sex marriage as the ultimate goal of such a community. Until the 1990s, the U.S. did not have a clear and stable notion of an LGBT community -- there were transgender communities, gay communities, lesbian communities and some overlap. This is still true about a global LGBT community. This unifying of different groups of people into an LGBT community produced a unified political agenda. For Warner, this polit...

It's official. I'm off to India around the second week of May to attend the Regional Institute on Sexuality, Society and Culture sponsored by New Delhi-based NGO Talking About Reproductive and Sexual Health Issues (TARSHI). You can view their website here . The Regional Institute is one of TARSHI's programmes and is on its fifth year. Each year beginning 2004, TARSHI has put out a call for participants from South and Southeast Asia, 20 of whom, after a nomination, application and selection process, are brought together to go through eight days of learning and discussion with a focus on sexuality, gender and reproductive health. The topics that participants tackle include the relationship between sexuality and gender, sexuality and sexual and reproductive health, sexuality and pleasure, sexuality and rights, issues in sex work, sexuality and popular culture/representation. It should go without saying that I am ecstatic over the prospect of taking part in this year's Reg...

Book Review on American Anthropology Professor Tanya Erzen's 2006 book "Straight to Jesus". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Tanya Erzen is an American anthropologist and professor and identified herself as a "straight woman." She interviews and observes an ex-gay community south of San Francisco, California over the course of a year and does a bit of historical research of ex-gay faith communities, the media and political movements. In the late 1990s, the religious right in the U.S. began heavily promoting ex-gays as a political maneuver to deny LGBT claims for anti-discrimination laws or equal protection under the law. The LGBT community responded with an attack on ex-gays -- the 1999 movie But I'm a Cheerleader is a classic example. Yet, Enzer doesn't focus on either of these two opposing movements, the LGBT political movement or the religious right's political movement. Instead, she focuses on the suff...

Book Review on Canadian Sociology Professor Tina Fetner's 2008 book "How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Tina Fetner is a sociology professor in Canada and identified herself as a "straight woman." She reviewed documents from both the religious right and gay and lesbian sources and made a simple claim. The modern American LGBT movement was primarily shaped by the forces of the religious right. The religious right had better organization and way more money to contribute to opposing LGBT claims -- at least, how they saw those claims. This ended up, in LGBT organzing terms, putting significant resources and time into responding to that opposition, even if the area of battle was not a priority for the LGBT movement. As has been discussed at length in other scholarship, until the religious right started organizing against the mild anti-discrimination laws the LGBT movem...

In response to the call of "new politics" in the country, the Party-list Law also known as Republic Act (or RA) 7941 was enacted in 1995. The passage of RA 7941 was in keeping with the Constitutional provision under Article VI, Section 5 that 20% or about 55 of the 250 seats in Congress must be occupied by representatives "elected through a party-list system of registered national, regional, and sectoral parties or organizations.” The main idea behind the party-list system was to level the political playing field, so to speak, particularly for so-called marginalized and under-represented sectors of society like peasants, women, farmers, fisherfolk, etc. Some form of this system is favored in some European states and elsewhere. With such a system in place, the political process is not left to be dominated by big political parties alone. Unfortunately, the implementing rules of RA 7941 are far from perfect and in the last elections in 2007, opened the law to abuse. The Com...