How the Proposed Right of Reply Law May RUIN YOUR LIFE

You see Jackie Lou Blanco shopping for groceries, more or less ignored since it has been years, and notice that she has grown fat. So you arrive home, log on to Facebook, remember the sight of a more buxom Jackie Lou, and type in your status update: "I saw Jackie Lou Blanco at the grocery, and boy is she fat!" One of your friends clicks "like this", while another comments "hahaha! ang tagal ko nang hindi naririnig yung pangalang iyan!" And so your Facebook page remains for the next few hours until you spill cocoa on your rug and change your status update to something mundane like "I don't know how to clean a rug."

But for some reason, perhaps alerted by her kids or a favorite niece, Jackie Lou Blanco saw your Facebook status update about her. And she is mad -- I do pilates and bikram yoga and pay good money for a personal trainer! And the Right of Reply bill has been enacted into law.

Under the Right of Reply law, Jackie Lou Blanco has the right to demand that you cede your Facebook page to her, so she can post her defense to all the people who may have seen your earlier status update and concluded that she was now fat. If you refuse to let her write on your Facebook page, you will be fined around P10,000 pesos. Since Right of Reply requires that you allow Jackie Lou Blanco to publish her rebuttal on the same space where you published your controversial statement, you most probably will have to let her write your next status update: "Hi, this is Jackie Lou Blanco, and I would like to say that contrary to what you may have read from ______________, I am not really fat. I do pilates and bikram yoga and have an excellent personal trainer."

The hassle of dealing with Jackie Lou Blanco and her lawyers will likely invest only a few hours or days of your life, and irritated as you may have been, you decide to let it pass. Then weeks later, you see Spanky Rigor from T.O.D.A.S. on the street, screaming at a child beggar who made the mistake of asking him for money. You get mad at rude, cruel Spanky Rigor -- nobody however famous has the right to scream at a child. You want to let your friends know of the infamy of this Spanky Rigor -- to shame him with the truth in the limited capacity that you posses. You may even want to write a blog post about it. Then, you remember all the hassle you had to go through because of Right of Reply and Jackie Lou Blanco. You don't want to undergo the same experience just because of Spanky Rigor, whom you considered anyway way less funny than Frieda Fonda. So you let it go.

Weeks later, and you are royally pissed at your classmate Mike because he cheated in a class project. You confront Mike in a gentlemanly fashion, and he responds by flinging cold damp soil and moss at your face, screaming "Fuck you, retard!" You return home incensed, log on to Facebook, then start typing "I resent the fact that Mike cheated at our class project". Then you remember Right of Reply and Jackie Lou Blanco. Would Right of Reply apply to nobodies like Mike? You change the options of your Facebook account to make sure that only your friends could see your status updates, but you still aren't sure whether that will protect you so you call up your elder brother, now a hotshot junior associate in a Makati firm. Your kuya had to waste a lot of time researching on Right of Reply when you had your problems with Jackie Lou Blanco, so he does the prudent lawyer thing and tells you not to proceed with your intended status update. Disappointed, you delete your draft status update and write instead the enigmatic, "I am pissed!!!"

Since Mike cheated, his grades were high enough to make him valedictorian. Again, you are mad. You complain to the faculty by way of snail mail, but they ignore your complaint since Mike's Daddy promised to renovate the teacher's lounge. Injustice! Outrage! A Facebook status update will not merely do, you must write a blog post, create an online petition. The whole world must know of the craptitude of your school and the turd blossom tool that is Mike. Your kuya hisses, "Are you insane? Right of reply, right of reply! Napaka-liit na bagay lang iyan, hayaan mo na! Akala mo kung sino kang Woodward o Bernstein." That last reference is lost on you -- your brother was a really big nerd -- but the point gets across and you do nothing. On graduation day, as Mike is delivering his valedictory address, you stare at him, thinking "God/karma will get you someday!"

Valedictorian Mike gets the best jobs, meets the brightest people in the world, including evil scientists. He soon is ginormously wealthy and builds his own robot army, which invades first Poland, then France, and soon the world. Mankind, womankind and infantkind are enslaved by Mike, the Hitler of the Third Millenium. As you and your fellow slaves are hauling a two-ton marble slab to be used in the New Pyramids of Giza (20 times larger than the old ones!), your back stinging from the lash of the Tesla whip, you think, "If only I spoke up before. But that stupid Right of Reply..."

(God/karma eventually strikes back at Mike when his robot army becomes sentient and dissects him joint by joint. But that happens only in 2622 C.E. -- Mike having discovered the elixir against ageing and disease -- hundreds of years after your robot taskmaster miscalculates the power of its Tesla whip and decapitates you and the other members of Hauling Team #46775, including your kuya.)