FILIPINOS are known to be great imitators in general, but especially of things American. From fashion to accent, from style of government to social life: name it, Filipinos look up to America. This is not necessarily a negative thing. In fact, we have benefited much from imitating America in her practice of the fundamental freedoms of expression and of religion. She is known as “Land of the Free.” But last week, something profoundly disturbing unfolded that prompts the question: is America still that?
Not anymore for Mrs. Kim Davis. “Today,” said Roger Gannam, a lawyer for Mrs. Davis, “for the first time in history, an American citizen has been incarcerated for having the belief of conscience that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.” This is shocking both for the reason she was jailed and the fact that this is happening in America.
Here’s a short summary of her case. Kim Davis is a county clerk of the small American town of Rowan, Kentucky. Like all county clerks, she was elected to office, and her job “mostly involves shuffling paper: maintaining voter registration rolls, overseeing elections, issuing license plates, filing reports…” and issuing marriage licenses.
When the 5-4 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court (SC) forced all States in the Union to redefine marriage by classifying same-sex unions as such, under U.S. law, county clerks like Kim Davis were now compelled to issue marriage licenses to gay couples seeking them. But, being Christian, Ms. Davis holds the view that marriage is between a man and a woman. In her deeply-held religious belief, issuing a marriage license to gay couples is direct cooperation in something immoral. Put in the dilemma of following either what she considered an unjust law of society or the law of her conscience, she chose the latter.
For doing that, she is now in jail. Under present U.S. law, this seems to make sense: if she didn’t want to go to jail, Davis had to either issue the licenses or resign as county clerk. Simple logic, really.
But the simplicity of the logic masks both a sad and ironic reality.
Until 2015, no one in America has had to choose between holding on to one’s deeply-held religious belief about marriage and one’s government job. In fact, no one had had to defend oneself from losing one’s job by having to declare as a “deeply-held religious belief” the common sense definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman.
In 2015 America, however, one cannot now invoke even “conscientious objection” to prevent oneself from losing one’s job or getting jailed. This is the case not only for county clerks, but also for teachers, counsellors, army chaplains, and all government jobs in which marriage is spoken of.
Even more disturbing, in the last several months since the implementation of the U.S. SC decision, not only government employees but also private business owners – bakers and pizza restaurant owners, photographers, churches, schools, florists and farmers – have been heavily penalized for publicly manifesting the generally-held view that marriage is between a man and a woman.
Though unthinkable just some years ago, it will clearly be tough going in the coming years for millions of peoples of faith – including Jews and Muslims – in the “Land of the Free”, as far as the freedoms of expression and of religion are concerned.
In all this, the Philippines has so far been on the observing end. Yet, it is quite obvious that the very forces that have brought about this sad situation in the U.S. are also luring the Philippines to walk in the same direction. The official statement is that the new right of same-sex marriage for gays and lesbians has no “collateral damage.” Redefining marriage, they say, would not affect anyone else except the gays and lesbians themselves.
But current events now unfolding in America show the opposite. Many have lost and are fast losing their fundamental freedoms of expression and of religion while rights that have – in the words of Chief Justice John Roberts – “no basis in the Constitution and this Court’s precedent” are being announced.
This is a serious matter for Filipinos who are, undeniably, a people of faith. The idea of people in the Philippines being jailed or losing their jobs for publicly manifesting the age-old truth that marriage is between a man and woman is, quite simply, jarring to the Filipino sensibility; it borders on the absurd.
It therefore makes sense that, instead of jumping recklessly into the American bandwagon, Filipinos prudently stand from a safe distance and see where this whole American social experiment ends up. Especially since uncertainty certainly looms.
Anyway, this is not the first time we have desisted from imitating America. As a people we had made a wise decision to desist on the issues of divorce and abortion, and haven’t been all the worse for it. Without these we are, according to CNN, the 5th happiest nation in the world (no U.S. in the top 5) and the happiest in Asia along with Singapore.
We might as well apply to this issue what Filipino philosopher Celestino Gianan wrote in 2005. “Now is the right time to shift from being great imitators to being great innovators.”
Indeed, in a world where people affirm, in characteristic group-think, that progress has to mean engaging in wobbly social experiments, it is innovation (and common sense) to suggest that genuine human progress means rather reinforcing the basics. (Robert Z. Cortes is a PhD student in Social Institutional Communication at the Pontifical University of Santa Croce, Rome. He has an M.A. in Ed. Leadership from Columbia University, N.Y. / rzcortes@gmail.com)
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