Divorce and abortion (1)

I shall ignore the offensive tone of Roamer's reply (The Sunday Times, October 12) to my October 5 article 'Logic, common sense, divorce'. My credentials as a philosopher are established where it counts and hardly depend on his opinion.

Going straight to the point, perhaps he can show me what the truth is he says I fiddled with", or "had difficulty with" in my article. What he tried to show in his reply, as he said at the end of his column, was that I had "misrepresented what I wrote" (a strange complaint for someone who dedicated most of his previous piece to misrepresenting me and mine), which is very different. But then, he probably thinks that misrepresenting what he wrote is misrepresenting the truth.

I am supposed to have misrepresented him by deducing that his "grounds for denying the citizens of Malta the right to divorce lie in a supposedly predictable future". Wrong, he thunders. Well, if he describes the "sequence divorce, abortion, euthanasia" as "a matter of logic" and argues that "we may assume it is a matter of time" before the clamour for a civil right to abortion would inevitably follow that for divorce, what option does he leave me but to conclude that he is playing the questionable game of prediction and engaging in an argument based on a non sequitur? I hope this explanation removes his easy "bafflement".

Next, he claims, amazingly, that divorce "was not even remotely the subject of my piece". Now this is "fiddling". True, divorce was not the subject of his piece, but a substantial part of it took me to task for being critical of the bishop's sermon on divorce and supported the bishop's claim that abortion and euthanasia form a single package with divorce - hardly not being "remotely the subject". Perhaps the "never mind euthanasia" in the sentence he quotes was clumsily put; it was not meant to refer to what Roamer said but to qualify the "there is no lobby" part of the sentence. In any case, point conceded on this one.

But not on his final four paragraphs where he tried to play smart (or perhaps it constitutes a blind spot in his historical knowledge) insisting, as a kind of coup de grace, that he "has no idea" why I "bring in the 16th century". He must know that the 16th century brought the Reformation and saw the first legalisation of divorce in modern Europe, which is what we are talking about. This is not an "irrelevant assertion" - perhaps he thinks it so because he has mixed up the word 'causally', which I used, with 'casually', which is what he misquoted me to have used, thereby totally distorting the meaning of my sentence.

My point was that, given the huge time-gap between the two events, there is no causal historical link between the early introduction of divorce into European legislation and the introduction centuries later of legalised abortion. Therefore no 'sequence' for the two events can be claimed other than a chronological one. The argument is "ponderous" and "cannot be serious" only if it is grossly misrepresented, as it is by Roamer.