As the leaders of this country debate the Civil Unions Bill, I write to ask them to protect the institution of the family, which is at the very heart of our Maltese culture and central also to human society over the ages.

It is, of course, proper to have the taxation and inheritance rights of homosexual and lesbian couples guaranteed by law. Civil unions for homosexual or lesbian couples, however, should not equal marriage.

This is what happens, in deed if not in word, if the possibility to adopt children is extended to homosexual and lesbian couples bound in a civil union.

In the adoption of children, the focus should be on the children themselves, and certainly not on the rights of particular groups of people.

For the benefit of the children themselves, they should only be adopted by suitable heterosexual couples, who, unlike gay couples, would normally have expected to have children of their own. A heterosexual relationship naturally results in pregnancy and childbirth; a homosexual or lesbian relationship does not, in nature, bear material fruit.

I use the words ‘naturally’ and ‘in nature’ knowing that such words are nowadays shouted down, because – as we hear so often – ‘nature is cruel,’ and ‘pain and death are natural’.

While it is true that nature includes cruelty, pain and death, it does not mean that human society becomes happier when it alienates itself from nature. On the contrary, alienation from nature is a major cause of individual and social unease. Society renews itself, we should remember, through gendered reproduction.

Common sense knows that nature is gendered: male and female. The fact that sexual orientation can be indefinite in a number of individuals does not change this. Common sense knows that a child should be brought up in a natural family: made up of a man, a woman and children.

It is a pity to see common sense being drowned in the clamour for group rights, or in political opportunism. Malta’s leaders should not betray their people by using deceptive nomenclature, as they would be doing in enabling civil marriage between homosexual and lesbian couples in the guise of ‘civil union’.

The rights of homosexuals and lesbians should be protected by the law. But the ‘rights’ of these groups should not push aside the needs of a whole society, which renews itself through the marriage of heterosexual couples and in gendered reproduction.