Morality by committee.

(From Philippine Daily Inquirer)

Byline: Conrado de Quiros

IT'S been an interesting debate in Inquirer's Talk of the Town the last couple of Sundays. That's over the Presidential Commission on Values Formation which GMA formed last May 14. Her EO said it was meant to eradicate "every form or manner of graft and corruption, patronage politics, apathy, passivity, mendicancy, factionalism, and lack of patriotism and replace the same with honest public service and love of country." The debate has been whether the values formation by legislation, or by decree, will work.

I leave the readers to go to the articles in Talk of the Town themselves; their diligence should be rewarded by an insight or two from some of them. My own take on it is this:

What the commission proposes to achieve I can at least sympathize with. Last Friday, I spoke to a group of kids from various schools in Subic, and those were pretty much the things I talked about too. This is a country that is riddled by corruption, patronage politics, apathy, passivity, mendicancy, factionalism and lack of patriotism. It would do well to replace those bad traits with honesty and integrity, a politics of principle or ideals, concern, involvement, a fierce independence, and a keen sense of country. That is all very well, but the question is how.

My own reaction when I learned that GMA had formed a commission on values formation shortly after the election was not unlike Winston Churchill's when someone who had just told a longwinded story concluded by saying, "To make a long story short ... " Churchill retorted, "Too late." It is not merely that GMA is the least credible person to promote the kind of values her commission means to propagate, it is that she has just demonstrated over the last few months the very bad traits her commission means to eradicate. All her forming a commission for values formation proves is that the devil herself will quote Scripture to suit her purposes. Or GMA will make deals with Jinggoy Estrada himself to keep power.

Lawrence Esguerra says the commission's detractors do ill to dredge up the corruption scandals against GMA and her husband that have never been proven. Well, you don't have to dredge up the remote past for that, you have only to look at the campaign itself. I will repeat to kingdom come, or until something gets done about it (and thankfully, Frank Chavez is trying to) that GMA's use of public funds to campaign is corruption. There is no escaping that fact-certainly not by blithely dismissing it, as GMA's supporters keep doing, as using taxpayers' money for the poor. Posters and billboards and ads showing GMA grinning from ear to ear, which multiplied in this country more miraculously than Jesus Christ wrought on loaves and fishes, do nothing for the poor, except irritate them.