Fr. Bernas: Contraceptive devices are not 'anti-life' CANDICE MONTENEGRO, GMA News 09/26/2011 | 01:50 PM Influential Jesuit priest and constitutional lawyer Fr. Joaquin Bernas, SJ said that family planning as proposed in the controversial Reproductive Health (RH) bill is not necessarily "anti-life", putting him at odds with conservative Catholics who oppose the bill. In a column published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on Monday, Bernas sought to clarify what being "anti-life" precisely means, for the term has been used "in the most pejorative way" in current RH bill debates. "It is used in the sense of being against existing life. Murder, in other words," he said. However, he said that in the currently toxic debate on contraceptives, "anti-life" could be construed to include people who do not want to add more human life to an already crowded population. He cited for example a married couple who decide to abstain from acts th...

DIRECT LINE By Boy Abunda (The Philippine Star) Updated September 02, 2011 12:00 AM A certain Mr. Pedroche wrote a letter to another broadsheet some months ago rebuking me on two major points. That I should not be talking on behalf, but to the LGBT Community that if one works hard he can be successful. And that my active participation in Ladlad is just in preparation for abundant politics suggesting that I am preparing for a political career using the fledgling partylist. Here is my answer to Mr. Pedroche en toto. Dear Mr. Pedroche, To say that where I am working (ABS-CBN) and where I went to school (Ateneo) are the very proofs that I was not discriminated is an uninformed statement. And to conclude that since I was accepted by the two institutions disqualifies me from talking on behalf of the LGBT Community is a lousy assessment. Please indulge me on the following. • I can do both — talk to and on behalf of Ladlad and the LGBT community because I have a voice and a life story that mos...

The 9/11 attacks as a literary watershed 04-Sep-11, 10:00 AM | Myriam Chaplain-Riou, Agence France-Presse PARIS - Ten years on, the dust from the twin towers hasn't finished settling on the literary world and continues to feed a growing body of fiction exploring the moral and physical loss the attacks left behind. Initially, few writers dared get too close to the horror that the entire world was able to imagine after watching the World Trade Center go down live on television. The first one to choose hyperrealism and attempt a description of the fateful moment itself -- the planes crashing, the fire, the panic, people jumping off the towers -- was Frederic Beigbeder. In "Windows on the World" (2003), the French author said he wanted to "tell what could not be told". "The only way to know what happened in that restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center's North tower on 11 September 2001 between 8:30 and 10:29 am... was to inve...