So beating up a woman to a pulp merits a mere two-year imprisonment sentence while the proposal to put up Anthony Neilson's theatrical work Stitching merits censorship from the highest court of the land and an outcry from half the nation due to obscenity and immorality (read about it here: http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20121202/local/Artistic-anger-over-banning-of-Stitching.447728).

When I compare a stage production – no matter how explicit/upsetting – to the real life beating up of someone to within an inch of her life, I know exactly which act I find most disturbing to my morals. And I hope I don't need to spell it out.

And yet, the latter merited only a few column inches of reportage on the media. No paladins of morality came out en masse to condemn the obscenity of the act, as they did when a production company attempted to stage Stitching.

For this, we had whole televised debates, public denouncements about the shameful state of our country's values and an unending stream of moralists explaining why it's perfectly all right for someone else to decide what I may and may not watch.

Not so when that little matter of justice for a woman who was very badly beaten up cropped up in court. No keepers of the collective conscience bothered to raise a hue and cry about how our values are going to the dogs. Or how disgraceful it is that a human being can be allowed to hurt another human so badly and only get two years (if that) of limited freedom for his efforts.

Does anyone else see a massive flaw in priorities here? Our supposed values have become so skewed that we are more concerned with fighting imaginary attacks on morality rather than condemning real and actual immoral acts.

When the two-year sentence was announced, I expected a hue and cry about the lack of justice for this woman. I expected those same people who hold morality so dear that they can't abide the thought of on-stage blasphemy to be even more offended by the idea of violence without adequate retribution.

But no... apparently it's all hunky-dory as long as we don't do something totally unacceptable like touch on the topic of sexual deviance on stage. Anything else will happily float through our collective values like water through a sieve.

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