The House-approved bill on promoting sex education and preventing teenage pregnancies is now effectively dead with the commitment of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to veto it if passed by Congress, Cagayan de Oro City Rep. Rufus Rodriguez yesterday said, a press release from the House of Representatives said.
“We laud the President for committing to reject this bill as approved by the House of Representatives and as presently being discussed in the Senate. His statement speaks volumes of his moral values,” Rodriguez said.
“If the bill’s objectionable provisions are not removed, this measure is headed for the graveyard. It is DOA (dead on arrival) at the Palace,” he said.
In an interview on Monday, the President said he has read the details of the Senate bill on sex education and preventing adolescent pregnancies.
“I was shocked and I was appalled by some of the elements of that (bill). All this woke that they are trying to bring into our system. That every child has the right to try different sexualities. This is ridiculous, this is abhorrent. This is a travesty of what sex education should be to the children,” he said.
Rodriguez said the President’s veto assurance “is a message for the House and the Senate to no longer waste precious taxpayers’ money, time and effort on the bill as presently worded.”
“The two chambers should rewrite it to delete provisions which violate the constitutional natural and primary right of parents to rear and educate their children and offensive to the sense of morality of parents, teachers, children, and the general public. The final copy should be acceptable to them and the President, who has to sign it for it to become a law,” he said.
Last Friday, Rodriguez filed House Resolution 2174 urging the House of Representatives to recall its approval of the bill proposing a national policy “in preventing adolescent pregnancies and institutionalizing protection for adolescent parents.”
The House approved the bill on Sept. 5, 2023 and had sent it to the Senate, which has a separate but similar version.
Rodriguez now said the measure “is deceptive” and violates several provisions of the Constitution and the Family Code, including a prohibition against a bill having more than one topic.
He noted the apprehensions and warnings expressed by the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches and Public Policy Review Commission Chairperson former Supreme Court chief justice Maria Lourdes Sereno that CASE, which is being promoted by three United Nations agencies, “is an international program…that will hyper-sexualize children at a very early age.”
The bill also contravenes Family Code provisions recognizing the “natural right and duty of parents over unemancipated children and their duty to care for and rear them (Art 209), and that parents exercise parental authority over unemancipated children and shall furnish them good and wholesome educational materials and prevent them from acquiring habits detrimental to their health, studies and morals (Art 220, par 4),” he claimed.
It also deprived parents of their natural right and duty to rear their children, to give them parental guidance and to give or withhold parental consent, he said.*