President Emeritus Fenech Adami believes that MPs, having abdicated their responsibility to legislate or otherwise on divorce, should anyway ignore the majority vote and vote according to their conscience, in other words "no".
He invoked, in the manner of hard-line Christians, the spectre of abortion, asking whether if the majority voted for abortion, MPs should ignore their conscience.
His views, to which he, it goes without saying, has every right, should however be seen in the context of one simple fact: divorce is not abortion. Abortion affects the unborn child, divorce affects no-one but the couple, and even if only one of the couple chooses divorce, the other can still continue to act as if married.
Divorce, before anyone jumps in, does not affect society either: broken marriages affect society.
This leads me to be blunt, with deep regret.
My memories of, and deep respect for, Dr Fenech Adami are built on the sight and sound of a leader who stood up against incipient tyranny and a disrespect for the citizen that bordered on the dictatorial and, latterly, on the man who piloted this country to its safe European harbour. His was a basic but profound logic: we are a sovereign people, made up of individuals with basic, inalienable rights, capable of grasping our destiny.
This current manifestation of the man is not one that I would care to keep in my memory. How can the man who led the country away from the excesses of Mintoff and his unelected successor now tell MPs that they should ignore the will of the people, freely expressed?
How can the man who stood against the SMU, defied the thugs in Tal-Barrani, looked at Raymond Caruana dead and countless other episodes in our country's past appear to deny his party's (it's still his party) proud liberal, inclusive and democratic roots by arguing this way?
His arguments may legally sound, but by making them he is not doing himself, or the country, any favours. He may not – and perhaps should not – care but I do. I want to hold him in my memory for the right reasons, not these.