No act that falls within free expression can be impinged by the law, or those in power. Even if it is wrong. Even if it does have the ability to corrupt. Even if it is pornographic.

As a taxpayer, as a citizen, and as a writer, I condemn Senate Bill 2464.

It carries with it Ray Bradbury’s overtones: to imagine a police that burns marijuana and bulldozes DVDs is one thing. But thanks to a proposed bill (OK, bull) like SB 2464, we just might see book-burning, blog-raiding, and just about everything else that threatens to “damage” our “moral fiber.”

I do browse, read, and watch more than my own fair share of porn. Yes, I happen to like it, to a certain extent. There are some porn materials that I will stare through and gawk at and fantasize about, and at the same time, there are some kinds of porn that I will condemn. I’m not saying that porn is normal, I’m not saying that it’s healthy, and there’s really no excuse or justification I can pluck out of the void to justify the slow corruption of my moral fiber. Yet for the Government to act beyond its grasp – to act as a moral police – is yet another brick in the facade of fascism.

Senator Manny Villar’s bill is that brick in the wall. It is the very pornography, the very obscenity, that he seeks to wipe out the “morally-corrupted” hindquarters of this nation.

Villar’s bill defines “obscenity” and “pornography” along the lines of sex. Yet what the Senator fails to realize is that “obscenity” and “pornography” do not just describe the disgust that there is in wanton and gratuitous sex. Freedom of speech is not absolute, and so is pornography. There are so many places that you can get descriptions of breasts and genitalia, and so many ways to get erotic reactions and feelings from all sorts of things. There’s “porn” in medical textbooks, in anthropological tracts, in newspapers, in religious texts, and so should you choose, find something pornographic about people selling Japanese sweet corn on the sidewalks of Katipunan Avenue. Or the obscenity in having pink urinals and not proper comfort rooms on major roads in the Metropolis.

Villar’s bill defines “obscene” as something that “tends to corrupt or deprave the human mind.” There is obscenity in graft, corruption, and the many salacious and malicious deals that do not benefit the people. There is something pornographic about day-to-day existence, if Villar so chooses to define “pornography” as something “calculated to excite, stimulate, or arouse impure thoughts and prurient interest.”

The bill invokes the “proprieties of language and human behavior.” May I ask the good Senator, what is so obscene or so pornographic about a word? Haven’t we all been taught that language is an arbitrary relationship of signs and symbols in a field of difference? I ask, what violates our moral sensibilities when we talk about penises, vaginas, sexual intercourse, breasts, nudity, or fetish? Aren’t we more scandalized about things like poverty, corruption, and incompetence? Aren’t we more offended by a word like “censorship?”

When faced with censorship, and a fetishistic preoccupation with louse-infested pubic hair, I am far more disgusted with censorship. I am more offended by the superimposition of a backward, relative, optional moral standard than the syllabication of sexual, orgasmic, masturbatory onomatopoeia.

Yet the bill is not a problem of definition; rather, it is a problem of intention. The question is not “What?” but “Why?” The exclamation is not “What!” but “Why!” It’s bad enough that we get screwed out of the one privilege we have in a democracy – a vote – but when we get screwed by something as essential as free speech and creative expression, it’s a different story.

SB 2464 is not the triumph of the morality of this nation: rather, it is a slap in the face of a democracy. For all our failings, we are a country that was founded on obscene and pornographic forms of resistance: the Cry of Balintawak, the rejection of the RP-US Bases Treaty, Martial Law, the Sanduguan, the revolt of Dagohoy, EDSA, and just about every fetish that made this country – as “backward” and as “sucky” as it is – a model for free expression. It’s bad enough that some of us get truncheoned and water-cannoned in the name of change, but a proposal to turn us into a state of surveillance? That’s a different case. That is bollocks. That is bullsh*t.

No to – no, wait, f*ck – 2464.

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