As far as I am concerned, two people who love each other should be entirely free to make their own arrangements. If they wish to marry, the State should make the institution available to them, if they wish to enter into some other type of arrangement, likewise. If they wish simply to live together, fine, it's no concern of anyone but them.

In other words, I simply don't care whether "gay marriage" is introduced per se, because there's no debate in my mind, just as there needn't have been about divorce, except for the fact that a bunch of agenda-driven zealots created one. If your belief system doesn't allow for divorce, then don't divorce but don't seek to ram your beliefs down my throat.

Likewise, in a more fundamental way, in fact, just get out of other people's lives, once and for all, and stop knotting yourselves up in moral dilemmas that are just artificial constructs growing out of what are often your own obsessions, fears and weaknesses.

You will have noticed my starry-eyed innocence in the preceding paragraphs. Divorce, gay marriage and anything that is even slightly connected with human reproduction raise such a maelstorm of opinionated twaddle that the basic truth, that human relationships are based on love and respect and not much else, is lost in the fog of war.

If you want a stark illustration of the depth of intellectual depravity to which the obsessed and bigoted will plunge any debate that involves sex, watch Stephen Fry's two-part documentary that was aired a few days ago on the BBC. "Out There" involves Fry examining what it is to be gay around the world, especially in such bastions of liberal democracy as the Southern States and the emerging democracies, including Russia.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the scene is depressing, almost terminally so. The absolute rubbish with which the anti-gay lobby comes up, worldwide, has to be heard to be believed and even then, you probably won't believe it.

On the other hand, if you're a narrow-minded clump of insecurities (in which case, why are you reading this?) you'll probably believe every word of the garbage spewed out and use the "it's true, it was on television" argument to shore up your next piece of poison.

Given the strength of emotion that the subject whips up, the somewhat naive argument I make in the opening paragraphs, that in fact there shouldn't be any debate about gay marriage or any other aspect of human relationships, falls flat on its face. We have to have the debate, if only to use the process to deflate, perhaps some day once and for all, the pompous morons who want theirs to be the only lifestyle that is allowed, on pain of death if you're unlucky enough to live in some godforsaken shithole.

So Joseph Muscat and Helena Dalli's rush to get the Civil Unions Bill into law is just a touch eyebrow raising.

Basically, it's not a bad idea to get this done, though perhaps some decent legal drafting might not go amiss, but I have this sneaking suspicion that Muscat, wearing his Marketing Guru hat (like he's ever taken it off) has clocked the paroxysms which the PN had suffered over divorce (and if they're not careful, they're going to let the fundamentalists get them into it again) and is doing everything to avoid the same trap.

He will, of course, be helped by the fact that there's no-one out there likely to use the debate to embarrass his own party and further his own agenda and by the reticence of the Church to wade in with both feet this time, preferring to comment about the idea of having a bridge between Gozo and Malta.

It's a growing trend that Joseph Muscat is held to a much, much lower standard than Gonzi was: if the PN in Government over so many years had pulled a twentieth of the strokes the current bunch have pulled in a few months, the sky would have fallen. As it is, anything goes, because no-one really expects any better.