blackshama's commentary on Philippine issues

IT WILL KNOCK THE NOGGINS OF THE BISHOPS AND THE CELDRANITES ON  WHY THERE IS A NEED TO THINK ABOUT DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITIONS AND FATES At the rate things are going, Noynoy Aquino cannot afford the accelerating downward trend in his approval ratings so he cannot afford to lose his liberal constituency. Except for the most doctrinaire everyone from the Catholics to the non-believers agree that we need to manage our population. The question is what method to use? The Philippines is probably between the late stages 2 and the very early of 3 of the demographic transition but it appears that this transition is rather slow. The country is not closed to the outside world and exchange of ideas and commodities, so the question is why this is slow? The Roman Catholic Church opposes the use of artificial methods of fertility regulation on moral grounds. The idea of natural law is central to Catholic theological understanding. I will not dwell on this issue but it is testament to the  c...

This whole brouhaha about sex education in the schools shows that a lot of Filipinos have a narrow idea of what sex is. Sex for most is limited to the reproductive organs and the sexual act. And this gives the Church, parents and teachers on who should be the right people to tell children about sex. May I suggest Charles Darwin? Unfortunately he is dead and buried in Westminster Abbey. But his book (which I believe is more radical than his own "Origin of Species") "The Descent of Man" lies down our modern ideas on how we should look at sex. Sex is crucial to understanding evolution. First of all Darwin observed that the sexes are different. The males have structural differences from the female and in some cases these are so obvious. Look at the horns in some mammals. In some cases, only males have them and in most cases, the males have larger horns. These are what we call secondary sexual characteristics. Any child who grew up in a farm notices these (after all chil...