Walk for Life opposes Philippines sex education bill

‘The issue with sex education is that it teaches students how to engage in intercourse safely, but it fails to embody the sacredness of the act.’

Thousands of Filipino Catholics joined a dawn procession in Manila on 22 February to oppose a range of “anti-life” measures, including a controversial sex education bill that President Ferdinand Marcos J. promised to veto.

The procession, called Walk for Life, was organised by the Council of the Laity of the Philippines.

It was the seventh time the procession was held in the nation’s capital. The first time in 2017, on the initiative of the then-Archbishop of Manila Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, was part of the Catholic Church’s opposition to the bloody war on drugs under then-President Rodrigo Duterte

Benita Javier, a teenager, spoke at this year’s event against the “alarming” trend of “hypersexualised teenagers”, as well as pornography and “comprehensive sex education in schools”.

“The issue with sex education is that it teaches students how to engage in intercourse safely, but it fails to embody the sacredness of the act. It reduces it to a biological, physically pleasurable act rather than its sacredness in how God intended it to be,” Javier said in a speech at the Manila Cathedral.

Catholic and Protestant groups have criticised a sex education bill in Philippine Congress because they claimed it would teach immorality to Filipino children. One of their claims, which proponents of the measure refuted, was that the bill would teach masturbation to young pupils.

Aside from criticising the sex education bill, the Walk for Life tackled other issues such as the upcoming elections.

Bishop Severo Caermare of Dipolog, who chairs the laity commission of the bishops’ conference, took a swipe at personalities who joke about killing. Former president Duterte recently remarked, in a campaign rally, that senators should be “killed” so that his preferred candidates can replace them in the Senate.

“In a society where the value of life is trivialised, and the utterance of ‘killing’ is simply a joke, not a threat, let us be visible signs of hope through the words we choose, as words can kill or heal,” Caermare said.

“As we face challenges in our nation’s leadership – where transparency and accountability may waver and the life of the nation is at stake, let us be beacons of hope by making informed choices in the leaders we support,” the bishop added.

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