The Progressive Organization of Gays in the Philippines (Pro-Gay Philippines) and all self-respecting homosexual men condemn the treatment of gays and all other sections of the Filipino people in the debate between the Catholic Church and the Ramos Government concerning the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, Egypt. 

The word war between Cardinal Sin and President Fidel V. Ramos has trivialized the concerns of the Filipino people into a debate on abortion and vilified homosexual persons' basic democratic rights and aspirations. 

The hierarchy of the Catholic church, in its desire to retain its patriarchal dominance over society, criticizes the Ramos regime's part in the ICPD, and misleads the Catholic faithful into a frenzy of disinformation and hateful ignorance of women's reproductive rights and homosexuality. 

On the other hand, the government consigned the country to yet another international accord, after the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT) and the Earth Summit, that places the Philippines at the mercy of the world capitalist order. 

The government's participation in the final ICPD round in Cairo this September will help perpetuate designs of the developed countries, and its multilateral tools, the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that imposes population control programs in the Third World. We do not subscribe to the emerging framework of the ICPD, as presently stage-managed by the international elite, that blames poverty and environmental decay on population growth. 

We at Pro-Gay Philippines support the struggles of Filipino women and men against the control by both institutional church and government of their rights to their own bodies, their own reproductive rights and their rights to a democratic access to all forms of birth spacing. 

Filipino homosexual women and men are one with the struggles of heterosexual men and women to realize the real needs that the ICPD, the developed world, this government and the ruling churches do not wish to seriously address: jobs, food, potable water, land ownership, free education and an unspoiled environment equitably distributed among all people. We resist indiscriminate experimentation of dangerous contraceptive technologies and unethical clinical intervention of the fetus among unsuspecting women and men. 

Pro-Gay Philippines deplores the HOMOPHOBIA intensified by the institutional churches, especially the Roman Catholic church hierarchy, that demonizes and devalues human rights of homosexual persons to partake in openly workable relationships. 

The church's outdated moralistic and patently unbiblical condemnation of homosexuality betrays its ignorance of the genuine love that can exist in families that are nurtured by single and paired persons who are homosexuals or bisexual in orientation, behavior and belief. 

The historical Jesus has extended compassion and liberation towards gays, lesbians, bisexuals and all sexual people, unconditionally, having had purveyed love and justice in his time, and he was free of the homophobia and sexist bias of powerful church leaders. 

Pro-Gay Philippines also faults the state for its institutionalized violence against women and men, whether homosexual or heterosexual, by means of laws, policies and actions that bind the family to patriarchal domination. These include gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace; coercive and cruel population control programs among the poor and indigenous peoples, and marriage, child bearing and adoption laws, and court decisions supporting these laws, that particularly dis-empower women and homosexuals. 

The government uses a policy mix of tolerance and tacit support to attacks by churches and private groups on women and gays to assure maximum performance of the semi-feudal and semi-colonial economic set up. The maintainance of rigid sex-role playing, exacerbated by class and ethnic conflicts, at home and in the workplace breed the optimum climate for the export-import-oriented Medium-Term Philippine Development Plan (MTPDP) of the US-Ramos regime.

We call on all gay, lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual persons, sensible Christians and health workers to unite and guard ourselves from this reductionist debate between church and state. We must speak out in defense of our true families and communities, against the coercive forces of institutions that reduce our control over our own destinies. Think twice before listening to and joining the August 14 rally mobilized by Cardinal Sin.