Our fifth family holiday from Ireland to Malta is drawing to a close. Here is some advice I'd like to give to the Maltese people with regard to Malta the way we like it, that is the inspiration it is for traditional family values.
People who are in favour of limited or unfettered abortion facilities are often referred to as secularists. They see nothing particularly transcendent in human beings. What you see in life is what you get. They are not against religious values but just insist that they be kept out of civic life. People should keep their religion to themselves. Typically secularists believe that traditional values are just finally on the way out. They always believe that they are going to win... until they lose. They believe they are the cutting edge of modernity. They think, God love them, that the Roman Empire times were the best, when parents had the right of life and death over both their slaves and their children!
Secularists typically believe that traditional values are finally on the way out. And often they could be forgiven for thinking so - the electorate is often so sleepy. But the abortion issue, in your country as in ours, is probably a sleeping giant, speaking from an electoral viewpoint.
For political parties and candidates in Ireland being "pro choice" is a label that clings like a bad smell. It has held back the very lively new party Sin Fein. And it has all but destroyed the second main party, Fine Gael. The Fine Gael party has many great features but a saying applies to them that is commonly heard where I live, used by women about prospective suitors: I wouldn't take him if his bottom were studded with diamonds!
In my constituency in Donegal we were able a few years ago to demonstrate the electoral strength of the abortion issue. We urged people to vote strategically. We managed to elect a candidate even if he was the oldest ever elected to our Parliament and he was also the little party's only candidate. In doing so we had to push out an almost 100 per cent pro life, well loved, Fine Gael candidate of 30 years standing. We used full page advertisements in several of the local papers over a period of two weeks to persuade people to vote not for the candidate or his party but for pro life. He came second of the three elected.
It doesn't take much to awaken strong feelings about the dastardly act of abortion with all its implications not just for the child but for all of us.
The Fine Gael party, since it first moved to introduce limited abortion, has been for all the world like somebody with terminal cancer.
All that happens is that a sufficient number of people remain caring about the issue. The crucially important move for us was to have managed to get the constitutional amendment of 1983 passed by referendum. This forces the secularists to come out into the open and to direct their fire at it. It is the only gate by which abortion can enter Ireland. It is not perfect but without it the secularists would only have to get a majority of the members of our Parliament to vote to repeal the 1861 Offences against the Person Act and to simultaneously permit abortion, just like England and America. It is not so easy for secularists, who typically are very elitist and have only a lightly disguised contempt for the electorate, to subvert the minds of a whole nation to change its Constitution.
The Maltese people ought to remember that when they do manage to get the ban included in the Constitution they should not rest on their laurels. Get laws passed on the basis of it to give the amendment to your Constitution some teeth.
Otherwise the secularists will not rest until they have overturned it. But, of course, as always, it is not the amendment itself that matters but rather the fact that it is a great expression of the unshakeable living determination of the Maltese people to enshrine only laws that are both right and true, sustained and encouraged at all times by the Christian Church.