Photo courtesy of Democratic Audit, Daniel Go
Presidential aspirant Leni Robredo and Bishop Socrates Villegas have gone on record as saying that voters should take vote-buying bribes offered to them despite going on to vote a different candidate later on. The late Jaime Cardinal Sin had also said the same thing before.
I hope that people with a true sense of decency also have the common sense to see the ridiculousness in this.
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Supporters of the above-mentioned people will argue, but voters will do that anyway! That’s practical! Why condemn such an act? Let them do it!
But in both true Christian and secular values, that act is dishonest.
First, why take the bribe at all? When you take the bribe, you signify a promise to vote for the candidate. Denying this is a foolish exercise of illogic. And isn’t accepting bribes wrong at all? Perhaps the people above don’t realize that what they’ll do will have an effect of sanitizing all other forms of bribery.
Second, if you take the bribe and vote for someone else anyway, isn’t that lying? So not only do you take bribes, but you lie.
The right answer would be to never take the bribe at all.
I wonder if the politician and church people mentioned here are thinking that any way to give to the poor should be acceptable, even if the means used is sinful by their own standards. Basically, the end justifies the means for them, with the willingness to make compromises to their values. If they do, that would be rightly identified as hypocrisy.
I find it both appalling and amusing that Catholic religious authorities (though I believe there are others who are actually facepalming) are encouraging corrupted values. Either those religious authorities are confused about their own values or, as some articles on this blog and many others have said, are willing to twist their own values in support of their own agenda, which the Catholic Church after all has done in its long history. Or both.
This makes me even more glad to have embraced “Protestantism” a long time ago.
I believe, as my cohorts here do, that what Filipinos embrace as their culture is what actually pulls the country down. And those who seem to be anti-dictators, who may also believe themselves to be “heroes,” are the real dictators.
Corrupted Values on Vote-buying
Source: Filipino News Bulletin
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