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Anti-Discrimination Bill picks up supporters as Congress debates its passing

This comes at an opportune time when everyone has experienced discrimination at some point.

Support for the Anti-Discrimination Bill, once called the SOGIE Bill, has been picking up steam outside the plenary as the 18th Congress continues to debate whether or not the bill should be passed into law.

Celebrities have been some of the bill’s biggest supporters outside of the LGBT community who pushed for the bill.

Content creator and online personality Mimiyuuuh shared this post of a netizen that shows a woman berating and assaulting a transwoman in Antipolo, Rizal.

Pia Magalona also chimed in, sharing her thoughts not just as a supporter of the bill but as a resident of Antipolo.

Other celebrities—both online and IRL—continued to show support and highlight why the bill is needed.

Macoy Dubs

https://twitter.com/macoydubs1/status/1324599878383624192?s=21

Kyo Qujano

K Brosas

John “Sweet” Lapus

Even Kathryn Bernardo and Maris Racal have made her thoughts known.

https://twitter.com/jphabac/status/1324306028733755393?s=21

These are but a few of the Anti-Discrimination Bill’s (ADB) supporters. But why? Why are people clamoring for a bill that seeks to institutionalize something that should be innate in all of us?

Their support all boils down to one thing: the ADB isn’t about the rights of the LGBT community anymore. A quick run-through of the bill shows that it does, in fact, apply to ALL Filipinos—regardless of your sexual orientation or gender identification and expression.

The bill also protects everyone from people who diss others based solely on their social status, religion, educational attainment, and more.

This, however, presents a problem as this has been enshrined in the 1987 Constitution under Article 3 or the Bill of Rights.

The fact that there needs to be a separate law for something as simple as human decency seems to have escaped our psyche. Hate crimes against the LGBT community have been on the rise. The entertainment industry continues to capitalize on the Filipino mentality of treating members of the LGBT community as nothing more than cannon fodder, the butt end of jokes.

You’ll even hear publicly elected officials use the words bakla and bayut—the Visayan term for gay—as derogatory words.

This is why meetings like this and people like Rep. Geraldine Roman matter.

This entire thread from the Philippine Anti-Discrimination Alliance of Youth Leaders or PANTAY also contains most of the concerns against the ADB being addressed by the people who have pushed for equal treatment for all.

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