Remarriage after legal separation

I am sorry that your columnist, Roamer, chose to comment on the Today Public Policy Institute's latest report on the difficult subject of divorce in such a flippant manner (May 17).

Roamer, who is a very good, very old friend, received his copy of the report on May 15. One might have thought he would have been able to spare the 40 minutes it takes to read the report to conclude, at the very least, that it is not only thoughtful and thorough, but also has striven hard to be fair, balanced and objective.

Rather than taking out his annoyance at The Times for not covering the symposium, 'The Future: The Family', which otherwise gave the think-tank report front-page treatment and headlines across five columns, he should, as a veteran columnist of many years, have concluded that that newspaper was right in its priorities. The subject of broken families and failed marriages in Malta is stark and in urgent need of solution, and The Times reacted accordingly in its coverage and gave the report the serious treatment it merited.

Instead of quibbling over words and deliberately misrepresenting what is said in the report about the proper relationship of Church and State in a liberal democracy, what are Roamer's solutions to the rising tide of broken marriages in Malta? Remaining stuck in the aspic of 1950s Malta is certainly not the answer.

Yes, it does require people of goodwill to find a just and practical solution - a remedy, if you will - to an urgent issue.

What is Roamer's solution to this intractable and growing problem? To maintain the status quo come hell or high water?

Since Roamer says that he will have more to write on this report, let us be clear what agenda he will be bringing to the argument. He has written frequently in his column of his huge admiration for G.K. Chesterton. He himself, like Chesterton, writes well.

But Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda.

In the last 20 years of his life every book he wrote, every paragraph, every sentence, every incident in every story, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan religions. Chesterton refused to believe in the idea of progress.

Fair enough, you might think. But if this is the intellectual rigour Roamer intends to bring to this important debate then I, for one, will ignore his comments and so will others.

Let him tell us when he replies: should a particular religious view on marriage prevail?

Do our legislators have a duty and a responsibility to seek solutions to this problem which are in the interests of justice and the common good of society as a whole?

Does he acknowledge that giving legal recognition to second relationships, which are marriages in all but name, by permitting remarriage after civil dissolution, can only advance the institution of marriage, not weaken it?