The apology that wasn’t

Representative Bong Suntay apologized for his controversial remarks about actress Anne Curtis, but not quite.

Yes, he said he was sorry. But in the same breath, he insisted on standing by his analogy, even calling it “effective.” His logic? The controversy proved his point because it drew attention to his argument during the impeachment hearing on Vice President Sara Duterte.

In other words, the outrage was the strategy.

Suntay argued that “desire and imagination are not impeachable offenses,” using his fantasy about Curtis to defend Duterte’s statement about imagining her decapitation of President Bongbong Marcos. The analogy, he said, may have been in “bad taste,” but he did not regret making it.

That is precisely the problem.

When a lawmaker apologizes but insists his remarks were justified, the apology becomes little more than political damage control. His critics — from Sen. Risa Hontiveros to Gabriela Rep. Sarah Elago and Quezon City Mayor Joy Belmonte — did not miss the point. What they saw was not simply a bad joke but a glimpse of how casually sexism can slip into public discourse.

Congress is supposed to debate policy, law, and accountability. Instead, the nation is discussing fantasies and an apology that is not really an apology at all.

— Jason Mago

Control yourself, Mr. ‘Honorable!’

Let’s start with a basic truth: people fantasize. Men do. Women do. Attraction is biological. Mammals are wired for it. That’s science.

But biology is not an excuse for behavior.

Representative Bong Suntay defended his remark during a House Committee on Justice hearing by saying that imagining something is not illegal. Maybe not. But legality is not the standard for public conduct. Decency is.

There are things adults keep to themselves. Fantasies belong in private conversations with your partner or among close friends. Not in a congressional hearing discussing something as serious as the impeachment of the Vice President.

Public office demands discipline.

Men are capable of attraction without turning it into disrespect. Especially in a room where the country expects seriousness from the people it calls “honorable.”

And let’s not forget who Suntay is. A congressman. A husband. A father.

A real man respects women. A real man controls his urges. A real man focuses on his family, his wife and his children, if he has them.

And if you have a partner or a wife, a man makes pretty damn sure he satisfies his woman in bed. — Carl Magadia

Honorable? Really?

In a time when mistakes are often condemned in public and the person involved is quickly crucified, it’s hard to understand why some people still cling to such backward thinking.

Take the case of Quezon City Representative Bong Suntay. During the House justice panel hearing on an impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara Duterte, Suntay made a remark that had nothing to do with the proceedings. He said that when he once saw Anne Curtis at Shangri-La, he felt heat and imagined doing things with her, adding that he could not be charged for it because it was only in his imagination.

Members of the panel moved to strike the statement from the record. Clearly, it was inappropriate, unnecessary and malicious. Suntay, of course, denied any double meaning.

But the problem wasn’t just the remark — it was the mindset behind it.

That kind of thinking — especially from a public official — is part of what continues to rot our social fabric. It reflects a crude, backward view of women and a troubling inability to understand basic respect. When someone in a position of power cannot even distinguish between what is appropriate and what is not, that tells us something about the values they carry into public service.

Suntay has a wife and daughters. I wonder how he would react if another man, speaking on national television, openly admitted feeling desire for his wife and imagining things about her. Would he see that as harmless imagination? Or would he recognize it for what it is — objectification?

This exposes something deeper in Filipino society: the casual normalization of sexualizing and objectifying women. It has become so ingrained that when someone calls it out, the critic is dismissed as “too sensitive,” a snowflake, or malicious.

We still have so much work to do as a society in eradicating this kind of mindset. For now, I hope Suntay manages to scratch whatever itch that led him to make such remarks in the first place.

Happy National Women’s Month, Suntay. A title like “honorable” should be earned, not freely given.

— Vivienne Angeles