(LifeSiteNews) — Filipino podcaster and activist Jay Aruga joins Jonathon on this week’s episode of The Van Maren Show to discuss the current state of the fight against the LGBT movement in the Philippines.

Aruga says that the Philippines has always been “gay friendly.” For instance, it is not infrequent to see an open homosexual at a mall every few seconds. From 2000 to 2010, “pride” parades were not a “big deal for us,” he continues, but since 2015 they began to transform from asking for the right not to be bullied to fighting for same-sex “marriage,” a fight that continues to this day.

Furthermore, shortly after the issue of gender-confused persons entering bathrooms for those of the opposite sex rose to prominence in the United States, LGBT-identifying Filipinos began to fight to “enter women’s spaces.”

The fight has only become “crazier” since then, says Aruga, with Catholic schools such as De La Salle University and the Jesuit-run Ateneo De Manila University openly flying “pride” flags. There are also government-sponsored Drag Queen Story Hours taking place.

What Filipinos are doing, he maintains, is “adapting” whatever they are seeing in the United States. One of Aruga’s goals for his podcast is to “expose the woke ideology that’s been happening in the West” to preemptively stop it from entering the country. The issue is that “we don’t get much news on how the West is learning from these mistakes and how you’re reversing course,” bringing up changes in the discourse over gender ideology.

People like Aruga are also currently fighting a divorce bill that he says is “being pushed on us.” The Philippines is only one of two countries that ban divorce, and Aruga believes that “once the permanence of marriage gets redefined, the sexes of the marriage will follow suit.”

READ: LGBT ‘Pride Month’ is not about celebrating, it’s about asserting dominance over the culture

Meanwhile, the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Expression Equality (SOGIE Equality) Bill, which has been in the Filipino legislature for over two decades, has thus far been successfully fought off. However, Aruga notes the bill is sometimes only a few senators away from passage. While the bill found its origins in “anti-discrimination,” Aruga tells Jonathon that “we saw in the West what the bill is all about.”

As of now, if a gender-confused man enters a ladies’ restroom, he cannot file a “legal complaint” when asked to leave. Under the SOGIE Equality bill, the gender-confused man can file a complaint against the one who complained about him. One “highly publicized” incident happened in 2019 where a gender-confused man entered a ladies’ room, and it “divided the country” at the time, Aruga says. In the United States, at the same time, the “bathroom bill… was not that far behind,” leading him to believe that the Philippines is following the United States in what it is doing.

Aruga continues by explaining that gender-confused people have been entering bathrooms for the opposite sex since then, as if there is an effort to conjure up controversy until the SOGIE Equality bill is passed.

While he would like to think the Philippines a religious country, Aruga says that religion is typically found in adults and the elderly, with the young seemingly under the influence of “Western culture.” Speaking to the influence of the internet and social media, Aruga tells Jonathon that while television and film play a part in Western influence, the internet and social media “definitely” play a larger role.

The media itself, he adds, is not unlike the American media, whereby a certain narrative will be pushed and anything that does not align with it will be ignored. A similar thing happens in Filipino schools. Most teachers, Aruga believes, are “probably Marxist in their leaning.”

He recalls an instance in which he saw an LGBT lesson in his daughter’s notebook, despite the fact that she attends a Catholic school. While the school received Aruga’s complaint well, other schools are “deeply into this leftist ideology.”

The reason why the Catholic schools are teaching LGBT lessons, Aruga maintains, is because the SOGIE Equality curriculum has been “smuggled” thanks to the Filipino “Magna Carta for women,” a document that calls for “gender sensitivity courses in everything.” Aruga also says the reason why his daughter’s school carried an LGBT lesson was because it was following a curriculum sent to it by the Department of Education.

“It’s as if they’re preconditioning the students… to eventually vote for people who would pass the SOGIE bill in the future,” he opines.

Considering a political solution to the issue, Aruga notes that unlike many Western countries, the Philippines does not have a two-party system. One of the solutions, he says, is to spread information to people about what is happening in the West and what is happening in the Philippines. Aruga hopes that people like him could hopefully show politicians that the “winning side is the conservative… religious side,” that people don’t want LGBT ideology, and that politicians hopefully change their minds on the issue.

The politicians themselves, however, tend to support issues that will get them the greatest number of votes – and so the greater the number of people opposing LGBT ideology, the greater influence they will have on politicians.

Aruga believes that public opinion itself is “swaying more now on the conservative side.” When Aruga began his podcast six years ago, Filipinos did not know much about “wokeism.” Now Aruga believes that many are already “unwoken.” However, the problem is that the media is supporting “wokeism,” and thus the spread of information has to be in interactions between people.

The Van Maren Show is hosted on numerous platforms, including Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, iTunes, and Google Play.

For a full listing of episodes, and to subscribe to various channels, visit our Acast webpage here.