That brave, conscientious man, Auxiliary Bishop Charles Scicluna has thrown down the gauntlet. He told parliamentarians that voting for gay adoptions would be a gravely immoral act. It is a clear position from his end and the Church he represents, but what about our parliamentarians? The confusion is palpable.
The source of the problem is the Labour Party electoral programme. It mentions, in one short sentence, the introduction of civil unions. Labour’s mandate is limited to providing a legal framework to a relationship between two people. It has no mandate to introduce gay marriage or gay adoption.
Our Prime Minister, in his usual doublespeak, dumps the whole lot together, and has ruled out a free vote for his MPs. You cannot blame him. This is one area where the Labour paradox is most pronounced – the uneasy balance between Labour’s newly-found liberalism and its conservative working class base.
In a recent outburst of grandstanding, the Prime Minister said equality for gays was a point of principle for him and was prepared to stand alone if necessary. Then, just like a schoolyard bully, he orders his MPs to stand alongside him and vote along party lines, like they had no principles of their own, maybe not even a brain. Must feel great to be a Labour MP these days.
Civil union, as redefined by Labour after the election, will radically change our definition of family and marriage.
The impact on society and on our children can be immense, yet the whole thing is being treated so frivolously, not least by Civil Liberties Minister Helena Dalli.
Writing in this newspaper, she said: “The law will not ‘allow’ gay couples to adopt, but makes them eligible to appear before the adoptions board as a couple, not just as singles.”
It is fascinating how you can reduce something as immensely serious as a child’s upbringing to childish wordplay.
So now, instead of one gay applicant, our adoptions board will be faced by two ‘married’ ones. It will make no difference, assures us the Civil Liberties Minister. If anything, there’s more control because the board will get to meet the two. Is this how painfully shallow this government thinks?
Why our adoptions board should be entertaining requests by single individuals is already questionable. That they now will consider gay couples raises even more questions. What sort of adoption policy does government, past and present, follow, if it has already departed from the basic family structure of two parents, a man and a woman?
For Minister Dalli, the adoption policy is not an issue at all: “It will continue to be the task of professionals to evaluate prospective parents be they heterosexual, gay, single, married or in a civil union.”
So there we have it, our House of Representatives will be voting on gay adoption in a vacuum, and leave it up to ‘experts’ to decide later what is best for our children and society. But this is not what they were elected to do.
Government has the duty to draw up a clear policy on child adoption and tell its experts to implement it. That is the job of government. While at it, it would be good ifit also told us what exactly is its family policy.
Yes, we know from those abusive, post-budget billboards that there will be free nurseries for mothers to dump their children in instead of nurturing them at home in their most formative years.
We also know that our Social Policy Minister said last weekend that the government wants to develop policies so that parents would be “productive”. Isn’t a parent productive enough by virtue of being a parent to a child at home? Evidently not for liberal Labour. Like passports, parenthood stands for nothing unless it comes with a price tag.
The question each parent with a minor child should ask himself today is: if something happens to me, do I want my orphaned child to be adopted by a gay couple? My answer is no.
Labour has no mandate to undermine an already weakened family institution and should be stopped from doing so
The state of some of our families today is atrocious, with a record of separations filed last year, widespread cohabitation, children born out of wedlock, and more recently, divorce. There is no doubt that gay people can be good and loving parents, and certainly more loving, more caring and better parents than some heterosexual parents we all know.
But just because marriages are failing, just because we as a society are failing our children, it does not follow that we should lower the bar and accept gay marriages and adoption because they may make a better job than some very irresponsible parents.
Gay unions are not a marriage, and for all their good intentions, a gay couple can never be a man and a woman, do not constitute a family and do not provide a proper male and female model that children need today more than ever before.
Shouldn’t the concept of a mother and a father form the basis of any government policy on child adoption?
Shouldn’t our government seek what is best for our children instead of pandering to a lobby it fanned out of control before and after the election?
As our Civil Liberties Minister washes her hands and leaves it all to her experts, the Nationalist Party is suggesting a study on the social impact of gay adoptions. This is a more responsible approach, which brings us back to Bishop Scicluna.
Catholic or not, our MPs would do well to turn to the words expressed by this bishop because they are based on sound Church teaching and not some electoral manifesto drawn up at Mile End by an immature copywriter.
The Catholic Church, for all its faults, is the best thing that ever happened to the western world and its social policy teachings are an immense treasure. Despite all the arguments being made on civil liberties, gay adoption is still a grey area, and if we are to err, then we best err on the conservative, for the sake of our children. In this context, Mgr Scicluna looks like the last man standing.
Where no electoral mandate applies, when there is an ideological vacuum, we rely upon our MPs individually, upon their principles, including their religious values.
If the Prime Minister won’t let his MPs follow their conscience, then Labour has truly become the most destructive moral vacuum to hit this country in its modern history. Labour has no mandate to undermine an already weakened family institution and should be stopped from doing so.
After exploiting the gay lobby for his political ambitions, our Prime Minister is now saying the issue of gay adoption should not be politicised.
Actually, it is the other way around – this is exactly the one issue that should be politicised, because there are basic values at stake – something the Prime Minister finds hard to understand.
Former PN minister Dolores Cristina said it was important for MPs to be allowed a free vote on matters of conscience. But we still need to see what the Opposition’s stand will be, if it will succumb to the gay lobby the same way it once succumbed to the hunters’ lobby, with pathetic results.
In the end, everything in life boils down to principles. Labour MPs do not have a choice between being Catholic or Labour, but a choice between acting responsibly in the interest of the common good, basing their decisions on sound moral principles and not on some electoral carrot intended to garner votes for power. The issue of separation of Church and State is in this context irrelevant.
To quote Barack Obama, a leading liberal from our time and who our Prime Minister imitates: “To say that men and women should not inject their personal morality into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
Will our liberal Prime Minister do the right thing, just this once, and let his MPs listen to their conscience and to their constituents who, surveys show, are overwhelmingly against gay adoptions? The fate of our children is at stake.