Ranier Fsadni
The President on the family
President George Abela's speech at the recent national conference on the family has been criticised for foreclosing what should be an open-ended discussion and for peddling myth. At least, the latter charge is true although I'm not sure he was trafficking the myths identified by the Malta Gay Rights Movement (MGRM).
President Abela made explicit that he was giving a personal view. Although he indicated his inclination to exclude homosexual unions from his understanding of both a marriage and a family, he raised the issue as a question.
He did not pre-empt discussion even on this point, let alone those concerning heterosexual couples. He was just canvassing the terrain public policy needs to review.
MGRM charged the President with limiting his definition of family to married heterosexual couples with natural children. It would have been psychologically intriguing if he had: It is public knowledge that he has an adoptive brother. But the speech explicitly uses the term "family" to refer to instances involving adoption, single parents and people setting up a new household after a broken marriage.
The speech does have serious limitations. But MGRM misidentified them. Whether President Abela believes homosexuality is unnatural, I do not know but his argument does not hinge on that myth.
He made assumptions about the nature of children, not homosexuality. He asserts human nature is such that children need both a male and a female parent and long-term stability in their parents' relationship. He calls marriage the "cradle" of the family because he assumes that heterosexual lifelong monogamy evolved out of the needs of human biology: children's need for security and long-term growth.
Of course, this view does imply that a homosexual couple cannot provide as good a home environment as a heterosexual couple but it implies the same about nuns running orphanages, not to mention single parents and others. It is not a view attributing vice to being homosexual, a consecrated celibate or a separated parent, but, rather, a statement about what, despite any individual heroism, it is possible to achieve given the needs of children. (However, he clearly believes that state and other aid can mitigate the "disorienting" impact of missing parents but not that of being raised by a homosexual couple.)
President Abela's main aim is not to condemn couples who cannot wholly meet children's developmental needs but, rather, to establish three points.
First, the family must be subservient to the needs of children, with adults ready to subordinate their own needs by making "sacrifices".
Second, not all family models can be judged equally able to provide the stability and male-female complementarity that (on this view) children need.
Third, public policy needs to define both marriage and family. This way the best model - the "traditional model" for President Abela, adapted to gender equality - can be upheld so that married adults are better able to take responsible decisions while family policy is better able to strengthen it while mitigating the weaknesses of other models.
As I read the speech, it leaves open the question of whether the introduction of divorce is advisable. Certainly, one can share President Abela's assumptions and be in its favour. The problem lies with some of those assumptions.
President Abela's account of the family's past, globally and in Malta, is a myth. The "traditional family", as we know it today, indeed even the modern secularised European family, was radically shaped by the Christian Church (and a good thing too, given what was displaced).
What "tradition" you pick also matters: What is colloquially called the traditional family in Europe and Malta probably dates, in terms of dominance, no more than 100 years or so and represents the spread of a middle-class family model across class boundaries. (Visitors to 18th century Malta found the prevalence of marital infidelity remarkable while parish priests were concerned about the rate of marital break-ups.)
Getting the past terribly wrong does not always matter for a policy-maker. Here it does. The past reveals that "tradition" has a record of diverse family forms, repeatedly destabilised by social and political development even in the distant past.
We should not be wondering whether the "traditional family" model applies to all of us but whether it can be adopted by anyone at all today. No marriage today has any real precedent in traditional society. Even those managing to live marriage as a life-long commitment cannot find in the past a model for a marriage that lasts several decades after menopause. A hundred years ago, average life expectancy was about 50. In some European countries, the average duration of a modern marriage, about 14 years, is almost the same length as the average duration a century ago, about 16 years (then cut short by death).
This does not mean that life-long marriage is today an impossible ideal. It does mean that the old ideal needs to be lived inventively. Continual re-interpretation, not once-and-for-all definition, is our lot. We might not be able to spare our children some disorientation but we can try hard to serve as models of how to deal honestly and dutifully with it.
The environment in which authenticity and marital stability are to be sought is itself highly unstable. Targeted state and other aid can be helpful; as a general principle; child-centredness sounds sensible to me. But it seems unpromising for policy to begin with definitions, especially on the basis of a mythical past and an unstable, diversified present.
The philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-84), who was homosexual, once told an interviewer that while heterosexuals had models of union to follow, homosexuals had to invent their own. Here is the memo MGRM should have sent the President: Your Excellency, we are all gays now.
Popular Stories
In Discussion
9 Comments
Post comment
Please sign in or create your Account to post comments.
Dr Mark A. Sammut
Feb 5th 2010, 21:50
@R. Fsadni
I think I can agree 100% with your comment, and actually said so in my second comment: "In other words, Fsadni is right on the myth!"
Incidentally, it would seem that when one speaks of "traditional" or "customary" one is referring to an idealized past. This has been the case since time immemorial. It has been noted by anthropologists that "custom is not a constant, though commitment to writing can make it so. Only very rarely do we have evidence of a custom before it is found recorded in a legal code".
from: Wormald P. (London: Blackwell, 1999): Legal Cultures in the early Medieval West: Law as text, image and experience, p. 8. Prof. Wormald refers to M.T. Clanchy "Remembering the Past and the Good Old Law", History 55 (1970), pp. 165-76, and D.A. Binchy, "The Linguistic and Historical Value of the Irish Law Tracts", PBA 29 (1943), pp. 195-227, at pp. 225-6.
This in further support of the main thrust of this article.
Ranier Fsadni
Feb 5th 2010, 12:21
@M.A. Sammut
My point was not that life-long monogamy, per se, is a bourgeois institution. Life-long monogamy can fit other historic and cultural contexts (not only what the Church was pressing for in the Roman period but also, e.g., the significant changes it instituted, in both canon law and practices, in the medieval period, as the anthropologist Jack Goody has shown.) The point was rather that the specific pattern of family life (a pattern of emotions as well as labour, obedience and intimacy) that is today often called 'traditional' does not in fact have long historical roots.
William P Flynn
Feb 5th 2010, 10:45
Beyond a shadow of doubt DrSammut; but isn't the argument here about what happens when the ideal breaks down at the micro level in sufficient numbers to create a problem at the macro level? And also the recognition by the state that there is and has always been more than one ideal?
Even a stopped clock is correct twice a day, so the church may be right in pursuing the ideal. But what happens when it's the one ideal or nothing is disastrous.
There are many ways to make a viable family in a less than ideal situation and surely you sound as you know of many as I do.
Putting people and families on the outer just because something goes wrong is terrible and the church and the government and now the President are always doing it.
Dr Mark A Sammut
Feb 5th 2010, 00:19
WIth regard to the model being that of "the working and all the other classes in majority of all nations and religions since the beginning of man on earth", Herodotus' Histories shows us that this is absolutely not the case. Herodotus describes different customs in the different societies known to him - he was writing in the 5th century BC.
Tim BIrkhead's Promiscuity (Harvard University Press, 2000) discusses not only male but also female techniques to obtain more than one mate.
Jared Diamond's Why is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997) sheds light on this delicate subject. From this book, I concluded that the church-sponsored monogamic life-long relationship is very close to what Diamond views as the evolutionary model of human sexuality! (Diamond is of Polish-Jewish origins.)
All in all, the monogamic life-long relationship is probably the most stable and the best model for the well-being of society. This was proven, to my mind, by the arguments presented in a 2002 Cambridge University Press publication: The Law and Economics of Marriage and Divorce (http://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/09337/sample/9780521809337ws.pdf).
Dr Mark A Sammut
Feb 5th 2010, 00:11
endowment of the new couple by the bride's parents. It thus defined a man's heirs as only those of his offspring whom his wife had born. Fourth- and fifth-century imperial legislation put un unprecedented emphasis on it as a permanent partnership, only dissoluble if one of the partners committed the sacrilege of grave robbing or resorted to withcraft, or if the wife had intercourse with someone other than her husband. Idealized as a consensual partnership based on mutual affection and respect, these legal provisions remained in practice throughout the Mediterranean areas of the early medieval West. ... they also informed the view of a succession of bishops, and thereby came to influence ecclesiastical teaching throughout the Middle Ages."
There is a very interesting contract dealing with concubinage in the records of Notary Giacomo Zabara 1486-1488, edited and published by Prof Stanley Fiorini.
Lastly, studies show the clergy was continually preaching about faithfulness and other sexual mores during the centuries - I refer readers to a French book translated in Italian and published by Laterza in 1995, Jacques Rossiaud's La prostituzione nel medioevo, which shows the obtaining sexual mores in medieval Europe.
In other words, Fsadni is right on the myth!
Dr Mark A Sammut
Feb 5th 2010, 00:02
Excellent article, Mr Fsadni!
I would like to draw attention to only one point. Whereas it is true that life-long monogamic marriage is a bourgeois institution, it is to be noted that the Church promoted the same model which it drew from that obtaining during the Roman Empire of Late Antiquity. This was exported all over Western Europe - even in places which had not formed part of the Roman Empire - in the 500 years or so following the collapse of the (Western) Roman Empire.
In her Europe After Rome (OUP, 2005), Prof Julia Smith writes that the inherited Roman tradition "recognized two mutually exclusive forms of sexual partnership, concubinage and marriage. The former involved no property transactions and was simply an acknowledged, long-term, sexual partnership between a man of high status and a woman of vastly inferior rank; a concubine's offspring lacked any inheritance rights. Concubinage was an alternative rather than an adjunct to marriage, a sexual outlet for young, unmarried men or widowers who preferred not to remarry. As defined by Roman Law, marriage expected husband and wife to be of equal rank, and it required a betrothal contract, the formal consent of both parties, and
Ranier Fsadni
Feb 4th 2010, 20:19
@E. Muscat
You asked about my sources. The claim about the middle-class or 'bourgeois' family spreading as a model across class boundaries is the orthodoxy among historical sociologists and anthropologists of the family. The claim about 18th-century Malta is based on Frans Ciappara's published, extensive archival research.
E.Muscat
Feb 4th 2010, 18:22
@W.P.Flynn:first you should declare that you are an atheist so that everybody reading your comment will understand your snide reference to the President of Malta going to Mass;then you invent 200 million catholic parents having gay children and grandchildren!To top it you mention Harriet Harriman proposed law in UK about religious bodies such as the Catholic Church forbidding it the right not to hire a person who is actively gay in a religious capacity(when this goes against their fundamental teachings) :this has apparently been put on hold.As the Pope,said freedom is before equality!
@R.Fsadni:There are two items which are very debateable gratitious assertions in your analysis:one is that the 'traditional' family is based on the middle class:I disagree.It is based on the working and all the other classes in majority of all nations and religions since the beginning of man on earth! The second assertion is about 18th century Malta.You are probably referring to Ball's letter to the British government commenting on the virtues of maltese women:the view of a british prude who hardly had enough time to understand mediterranean mentality ! I agree that times are changing but where are limits so we keep our balance?
William P Flynn
Feb 4th 2010, 10:45
"Whether President Abela believes homosexuality is unnatural, I do not know but his argument does not hinge on that myth".
Please don't insult our intelligence Mr Fsadni. Here's man who just had to tell us he went to holy Mass just before he did his fun run and can hardly wait to fall down on his knees, as I predict the PM and the Leader of the Opposition will do when the Pope lands in Malta.
The same Pope who this week mindlessly exhorted British Bishops to disobey new laws about giving homosexuals in Britain a fair and equal go in employment.
The fact that good Catholics have children and grandchildren who may be gay seems not to bother the Pope.
As he is a celibate he likely doesn't fully understand the feelings of (on average) 200 million Catholic parents who have and will never forsake, deny or accuse a homosexual son, daughter or grandchild.
As far as the President is concerned I would bet (and I would be delighted to lose) that like the Pope, he believes homosexuality is a lifestyle choice not a result of natural, but different, "wiring".