It saddens me to realise that parochialism is still so strong. The divorce debate has now taken new a dimension with ‘for’ and ‘against’ lobbies, both working hard to convince all voters that theirs is the correct argument.

We also have the Labour Party which will not commit itself and the Nationalist Party committed against. The Catholic Church too has entered the fray with pastoral letters and other means of mobilising the faithful.

What stupefies me is that nobody has yet managed to call a spade a spade.

Malta has had divorce for the past 100 years or so. Divorce is when a couple present themselves in front of a judge who will divide their assets between them; then their children, if any (probably giving custody to the wife/their mother) and then one goes north and the other goes south, not married any more.

We’ve had this for ages but in Catholic Malta we don’t call it divorce but ‘legal separation’. What we don’t have here, unlike the rest of the world, is the right to remarry. And that is what we should be arguing about, not divorce but remarriage. We do not need a new law for divorce but an amendment to the current law to allow remarriage.

With all this in mind I cannot understand the argument being brought up that divorce ruins the family and consequently society.

If it does, it has been doing this for a very long time and consequently I wonder what prompts the ‘against’ lobby to argue against it now. They should have been at it for decades.

The fact remains that, with all the good intentions in the world, marriages break down. When that happens so much bad blood is created that one rarely can go back and pick up the pieces.

Does that mean, in our democratic society, that the couple (especially if they are not rich and influential enough to obtain one or two annulments) are then condemned for life and have to remain celibate; or even worse go and live with somebody else with no legal safeguards, not even for future offspring?

And what about the bride who erroneously thinks that marriage will mellow her groom but instead, as bills pile up, he becomes more aggressive? Doesn’t she have a right to a good and protected life with somebody else?

It think it is time we faced facts and realised that broken marriages are already there; and giving one or both partners the right to remarry will not turn Malta into another Gomorrah.

It will just give legal protection to the remarried partner and his/her children.