You can’t see clearly now

After Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando tabled his draft divorce bill, I predicted it would produce “a stickier mess at the pinnacle of both political camps” (No mandate, no party, The Sunday Times, July 11). Three months later, the mess is even stickier and messier than expected.

For starters, I did not foresee that the Church would mimic the political parties’ wobbly gait. We had a top Church official threatening to herd lawyers and judges who applied a divorce law through the doors of hell.

Then a squad of prominent clerics popped up to declare that it was morally possible for a Catholic to favour divorce. Finally, the Archbishop and his Gozitan counterpart, having initially endorsed these clerics’ position, distanced themselves from it only a few days later. More than the sheep, it’s the shepherds who seem to be lost.

Moving on to politics, the opposition leader originally chose to walk a bizarre electoral tightrope. He promised to pilot a private members’ bill as prime minister and offer a parliamentary free vote on it. With an eye on the election, he hoped to garner the support of those who were too excited cheerleading for divorce to notice the contradictions in his stance.

By forcing a decision prior to the election, Pullicino Orlando’s bill snapped Muscat’s tightrope and he’s currently freefalling into a reality he was not ready for. Having first come out against a referendum, he is now warming up to it. Worse still, when on Bondiplus I asked him to tell me how he would vote on the bill in Parliament, he scratched his head more than using what’s in it.

On the PN side things are not going any more swimmingly. In the same breath in which Lawrence Gonzi launched a “candid and deep internal discussion” on divorce, he said he was personally against it. When I pressed him to sort this out for me, he replied that he has a right to an opinion.

True, but hardly the point. A party leader’s view does’nt consist of a single raised hand at a party meeting. It embodies the soul a party. Gonzi’s position took ano-ther odd turn last week when he said he favours a referendum, presumably before the next election.

With both party leaders pointing to a referendum, the thorny questions are now on the table. What will the parliamentary debate on Pullicino Orlando’s bill produce, a law or the referendum question? Will the parties stay out of the referendum campaign?

Will Muscat resign if the no vote wins? Will Gonzi do so if the yes vote wins? Will a triumph of the no vote mean that divorce legislation is postponed by what, 10, 20 years?

And this is not mention that nowhere in the world has divorce been introduced by referendum, except in Ireland for specific constitutional reasons.

Why are we tying ourselves in knots over a simple right enjoyed practically by the rest of the planet?

I suggest two reasons. First, for the past decade-and-a-half, both parties dealt with divorce in an identical manner. Silence. Ignore reality and just make believe that Malta is different. Under Eddie Fenech Adami’s watch, divorce was the pink elephant in the PN room which everybody had to ignore. Until Pullicino Orlando struck, Gonzi tried to follow suit.

On the Labour side, after Alfred Sant’s aborted attempt to introduce divorce in the mid-1990s, the subject became electoral anathema. The result? Having lived like hermits for so long, our politicians lost the capacity to do their job and now want ‘the people’ to do it for them.

Secondly, and more fundamentally, many of our politicians are incapable of distinguishing between morality and the common good. It is perfectly coherent for a cleric to say divorce is morally wrong. Even if 99 per cent of the population want divorce, it remains serenely plausible for him to continue to oppose it.

But a politician with integrity does not have the luxury of a cleric’s serenity. He is there to legislate on facts pointing to the common good and citizens’ rights, not to have peace of mind on his death bed.

Mgr Arthur Said Pullicino’s fire and brimstone rhetoric is neither here nor there. The real issue resides in the fudging of our publicly spirited clerics, prime ministers and politicians. They wish to remain conscientious moral objectors to divorce but invite us to contemplate it in the light of emerging facts.

This just does not cut it. Once the Church’s political acolytes, mostly found in the PN, accept that it will be facts pointing to the common good and citizens’ rights which sway the legislative argument on divorce, they have signed their own intellectual and political death warrant. Because history, Europe and common decency is on our side.