What happens if the nays prevail?

Before Monday’s Bondìplus on the divorce referendum, a good friend quipped that I should just wheel out a karaoke machine onto the set, ask questions and press the right button after each one. He had a point. Both camps are now running on the spot as a mind-numbing divorce fatigue sets in from Marsalforn to Marsaxlokk. Perhaps what this fatigue is blurring from view is the answer to the easiest and most crucial question: What happens if the no camp wins?

After Saturday, the legal and social need for divorce is not going to go away. If anything it is bound to become more pressing in the coming years. Malta’s rate of marriage breakdown in 2006 was 1.8 per 1,000 population. The EU average in 2008 was 2.0. Malta has a higher rate of marriage breakdown than Italy where divorce was introduced close to four decades ago. These are the facts and no argument can dampen their full force.

The key platform of the no movement has been that divorce is not a solution to marriage breakdown. Fine, but what are they suggesting should happen to those whose marriage collapsed irretrievably? We should “strengthen” families, they say rather vaguely. True, but hardly the point. Marriages that no longer exist cannot be strengthened because there is nothing to strengthen. It’s like offering a bottle of sunblock to a thirsty man who had just crossed the desert instead of a glass of water.

And that leaves only cohabitation legislation, which has been floating in out of the public domain like an ethereal spirit for almost a decade and a half. Recently, it popped up again in the heat of the divorce referendum debate. The spin was that it could be a halfway house, providing some sort of solution to cohabiting couples who would otherwise need divorce. On Monday’s Bondìplus, this option was thrown out of the window once and for all. The government declared that the type of cohabitation legislation being contemplated will “have absolutely nothing to do with marriage or divorce”. Edwin Vassallo, the chairman of Parliament’s Social Affairs Committee, added that this law “should not be thought of… as a substitute to divorce”.

So, what happens if the no camp wins this weekend? Nothing, except that the legal and social mess will continue to fester at a faster rate. By the Church’s own projections, in four years’ time there will be 35,000 men and women and about 13,000 kids whose lives will be in social and legal limbo because of the absence of a civil right enjoyed by every citizen in the world except Malta and the Philippines. In the meantime, the ostriches will have to bury their heads even deeper in the sand.

Now how did Malta get itself into this mess? Why are the very same people who say they can’t bear to read or hear another word about the divorce also say they feel confused, perhaps not sufficiently informed? Why does a survey I know of say that almost a third of the Maltese population believe that divorce will give them the right to remarry in Church? Why did our politicians turn their parties and Parliament into a circus over a simple civil right enjoyed by the rest of humanity? Why did the Church start the campaign with a promise of no crusades and end it with belligerent talk of wolves and sheep? Why have the studies on divorce in other countries been misrepresented and misinterpreted with intentional and wild abandon?

The answer I would suggest is this. The entire raison d’être of the no campaign was a ruse, a card trick on a national scale. All along it was a religious belief against divorce, masquerading as something that has nothing to do with religion. It was faith desperately ferreting for a secular platform to justify political action should have nothing to do with faith. Pulled apart by these internal contradictions, they created a mess for themselves. Then having the power of the pulpit behind them, the mess was elevated to a national level and sucked up thousands of people in it.

I will be voting yes on Saturday because divorce is the only decent, rational and civilised law to address the reality of irretrievable marriage breakdowns. I will also be voting yes because this country should not be forced to go through this mess again in a few years’ time. No more karaoke.