Let's grow up

The Into-the-Darkness-Campaign has taken a new tack. It's called No-Logic-Guerilla-Tactics. The ex-progressive, ex-Socialist, ex-internationalist, modern (as opposed to post-modern) Malta Labour Party has taken to shaking religious and cultural taboos at the Nationalist Party. Nothing makes sense any more. Anything goes.

Labour supporters who are viscerally anti-establishment are disoriented. Those who are more easily herded into the going party direction delight in the hypocrisy. This is really doing politics! U-turns, S-bends and loud noises until nobody knows his backside from his elbow. The Labour Party is more conservative than the Nationalists, yeah! Those less easily herded shake their heads in disgust.

Catholicism in Malta is far stronger than anywhere else in the world. The Vatican itself is made up of persons who come from social and cultural realities where Catholicism is not an overwhelming power. The Pope comes from Catholic but ex-communist Poland. The idea of a secular state as distinct from the personal and community good of religious belief is a given. In Malta it seems to be shocking to begin to explain about giving Caesar what is Caesar's.

Malta is different. In Malta Catholic culture dominates all others. It dominates and overwhelms effortlessly. Often it oppresses inadvertently. Dr Lawrence Gonzi's frenzied, public assault on the proposed visit of the Dr Gomperts' floating abortion clinic was an exercise in political theatricals, deliberate overkill. There is absolutely no possibility of the legalisation of abortion in Malta. All three political parties explicitly exclude it. So what was all the screaming about? "Look at me, I'm the most Catholic politician in the world's most Catholic country"? More votes or an entry in the Guinness Book of Records?

Is Dr Gonzi against contraception? If he's against everything but the rhythm method, why not try banning the huge range of other options freely available at every pharmacy on the island? If he's more Catholic than the Pope why not reintroduce criminal prosecution for homosexuals? Why doesn't he resign from the PN after its (undelivered) promise to recognise and regulate cohabitation (not divorce, of course)?

Helena Dalli, a new convert to Catholic fundamentalism, may join him in a campaign to reintroduce police investigation and criminal prosecution for adultery. Perhaps they would like to set up a commission to pry into the sexual practices of heterosexual couples to ensure fidelity to what the Catholic Church allows.

The recent European Parliament resolution on abortion provoked the expected reaction of the Vatican. Neither the European Parliament nor the Vatican possess the power to enforce their declarations on the ground anywhere in Europe. The contest is ideological. The MLP reaction was populist opportunist.

A scrum of MLP apologists have scuttled to their desks to write away condemning the scandalous EP resolution and to imply that it could have the force of law in Malta. The Brothers Grimm couldn't do better.

Abortion is a non-issue in Malta. There's nobody demanding it. Why start all the mumbo-jumbo? Because it could steal some pious votes from the pro-EU camp? What sort of political party is the MLP? It's beginning to sound like the last refuge of obscurantism.

Are these the same people who claim political descent from those who, in less enlightened days, faced the ire of the pulpit and the congregation to pull the teeth of religious fundamentalism in Malta? Where would they have been in the days when "Thou shalt not commit adultery" stopped being part of the Laws of Malta? They would have left homosexuals to suffer not only social exclusion but also criminal prosecution. Their hypocrisy and pusillanimity would have left policemen in the absurd role of High Priests poking their noses into people's bedrooms to put down hanky-panky.

With ex-Socialists such as the ones exploiting the nonsensical abortion non-issue today, the 1975 Marriage Act would not have seen the light of day. We would still have returned migrant Catholic males abandoning their families abroad and claiming Pauline privilege under the laws of Malta: decades-long registry marriages and their economic and human consequences wiped clean away. We would still not recognise divorces obtained abroad and find ourselves prosecuting Maltese divorcees for bigamy if they remarried.

Today it suits the MLP to appear to be more Catholic than the Pope, to out-Gonzi Gonzi. The immediate minimal political advantage for the Into-the-Darkness-Campaign allows them to jettison without a thought the milestones of politcal, legal, social and cultural development achieved by Maltese society in the past 50 years. That their credibility is in freefall on all fronts should come as no surprise.

What can anyone make of their manifesto promise to hold a referendum on divorce? For months now we've heard them say that they give no weight to referenda. Why are they promising that one? Now that they have outdone the PN in pseudo-Catholic hypocritical formalism will they ever bite the bullet on divorce?

It is high time all politicians grew up. Their scandalous exploitation of taboos they privately despise prolongs the country's confusion. Religious belief can neither be enforced nor shored up by force of law. Its partisan exploitation is humiliating for the perpetrators. Or it should be. It's humiliating for us all to be targeted as thick, vulnerable bigots.

Europe is the product of the Reformation and of the Counter-Reformation. It has learnt to be tolerant because it has been hideously intolerant before. The temporal power of the Pope is ended, to the immense benefit of peace in Europe and to the infinite enhancement of the Pope's moral authority around the planet.

Civil marriage is now an option in Malta. It's not compulsory. Nor is adultery. Sex is what the partners make of it: boring, beautiful or absent. Nobody expects the police to take an interest in the finer points. Homosexuality is legal. It has been for years. Everybody is free as a bird to obey the Ten Commandments.

Abortion is still a political bogeyman. Lehen-is-Sewwa in 1992, in the most despicable exploit of political cheating, claimed that AD was in favour in its pre-election issue. It was impossible to demand retraction. In 1998 George Pullicino, panicking for votes in the tenth district, pulled the same trick jumping the gun slightly. He retracted fast, avoiding a suit for libel but leaving the mud stuck anyhow..

One political hasbeen made up a threesome with Pullicino and the anonymous Lehen-is-Sewwa poison pen unearthing some past statements of persons now on the AD committee in favour of abortion. Is he anti-abortion? Or did he merely imagine that he had found some mud to sling to the amusement of his new masters?

Let's talk about abortion. There are far too many girls and women doing it: many in clinics abroad and nobody knows how many at the knitting needle professors in fior del mondo. It's a serious matter, not the stuff to turn into a politico-religious rag ball. It means guilt, human suffering and death. It means bearing a lifelong secret. It may be submission to real or perceived social pressure to avoid the shame of unmarried motherhood or its disadvantages. It may be the result of ignorance about contraception. How do young women learn to take control and responsibility? Do we leave it all to mother nature and social taboos?

In its 13-year history Alternattiva Demokratika has never uttered a word in favour of abortion. It has no business doing so. It is not an issue to be determined on party lines. It is a matter for personal conviction. If it is the policy of the state that is to be determined, religious belief is to be set aside also.

I am against abortion. I am pro-life. I hope to influence others by expressing my opinion. I will never stoop to silencing a contrary opinion, to threaten, browbeat, blackmail, or bully anybody pro-choice. I am a Catholic. It inevitably colours my politics. I would be humiliated to find that I had allowed it to oppress anybody of any other religious belief or of none.

I am against abortion not because the Pope says so but for a host of reasons that have nothing to do with my religious convictions. Catholics can and have been in favour of the legalisation of abortion. I am not.

There was a time when I saw the utility of taboos: moral shortcuts, ethics without reasons, a crutch for the uneducated, a big stick against the ineducable. Today our society is in great danger from its over-reliance on its obsolescent taboo structures. Taboos have produced hyporisy and amoral opportunism. They don't work any more, the dyke is broken.

The readymade morality learnt as school children fails us. What we were taught is constantly belied by experience. We have clear knowledge of the detachment of official morality from daily practice. It is a corrosive exercise in hypocrisy. We have come to the point where those who refuse to particpate in the distortion are despised as naïve. Those of us who have steered away from Catholicism are left without a guiding star because it is a cultural given that there are no other guiding stars. It is a fallacy and a real danger to our society.

It is possible to be a highly moral and socially committed atheist or agnostic. Every other religion imposes clear social obligations on its believers. Our taboos are threadbare, useless and a clear menace. It is time to grow up, to be Catholics if we choose to be, to respect all others' choices and to recognise the value of basic social norms. It is time to be intolerant not of non-Catholics, not of liberal Catholics but of the hypocrisy which allows covert or brazenfaced opportunism on a private and public level.

Above all it is necessary to establish the limits of debate. No political party should be allowed to exploit any real or imaginary nexus with any religion. The Catholic Church has a right and a duty to particpate in and influence political debate. There are limits. They have been disasterously overstepped in the past. It is time to define them, to unmuzzle the Church and to benefit by its fuller participation in debate. It is time to benefit from the wealth of religious diversity that exists in Malta. There are Maltese Christians of every denomination, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists. Some Maltese are atheists, many more agnostics. They have a right to be.

We all have a right to religious freedom. Political exploitation of taboos threatens this fundamental. We should all be outraged by the exploitation of the abortion issue. Those who pose as champions of our taboos for politcal reasons should be pilloried. If our values exist they should be defended by reason, argument and conviction not prostituted for ephemeral political gain. Let's get real.