Dispatch from Crame No. 314:
Sen. Leila M. de Lima on Duterte's attacks on the Church and women

5/28/18

President Duterte has set his sights, in aggravated mode lately, on the Roman Catholic Church and women. Several of his recent public speeches lately undermine and attack women and the clergy.

He blamed a murdered priest for his own murder by showing a concocted list of the priest's alleged mistresses. This of course insinuates what Duterte thinks Catholic priests are in our society. In the same breath, he also said that women are not suited for certain roles in society because they are easily threatened and intimidated.

If Duterte had his way, there would be no church and no women, as these are the two sectors of society that still threaten his rule and his imposition of a tyrannical and vulgar regime on the Filipino people. He has his own version of the story of the Garden of Eden, where he claims that God must have been drunk when he created women and put malice in the mind of men by enticing them with women's bodies, thus reducing women once again to the sum of their sexual parts.

Duterte's statements are as misogynistic as they are sacrilegious. They are the trademark of a man who holds no respect for society's institutions and values in general. He seeks to destroy them and create the world according to his own version of what it ought to be.

Only one other being has sought such a vision of remaking the world and humanity, the Devil himself. Every day that Duterte seeks to undermine the two sectors that remain a threat to his reign, his words eerily sound familiar to be that of the Devil himself. Duterte has become the voice of Satan in our country. It is as if he is paving the path for the Devil's conquest of the Filipino people. In fact, by all appearances of the sanctioned murder and corruption under his regime, that is what is already happening now.

Many continue to remain blind as they have already accepted murder and corruption under Duterte. They support him regardless of his statements and his actions that devalue life, humanity, religion, and women. The fanatical devotion can only be likened to that of a cult. And as revealed in their applause of Duterte's most recent statements, the fanaticism is turning out more and more to be none other than that of a Satanic cult.

Duterte's vision is not one of salvation. Quite the contrary, it is leading us towards a nihilism of social values and humanity itself. What he is not telling us is that in his version of the Garden of Eden, he is actually the snake that has come to shatter our land with violence and death.

The presidency is nothing now but a bully pulpit of hatred, directed at those who still struggle to resist the incarnation of evil in our land. This is now the battle that the Church and all its faithful must fight.