The hunters’ brigade could not have found a more apt champion for their cause than Labour’s European Parliament candidate Cyrus Engerer.

At first glance, they may come across as very strange bedfellows. Engerer says he doesn’t share hunters’ passion for killing birds and never will because he doesn’t have their tastes.

One can suppose that the average alpha male hunter, with a gun slung over his shoulder, does not share much of Engerer’s tastes either. But those are just mere details when you’re dealing with Labour.

Engerer, out of pure respect for a pastime that disgusts many, and certainly not out of political interest, collected 1,600 signatures for a petition being organised by the hunters’ lobby to  it gets a bit tricky here to explain stop a referendum that would stop them spoiling everyone else’s spring.

He said he collected the signatures because he wanted to safeguard minority rights and wasn’t doing it for votes.

Engerer claimed his sole intention was to show solidarity with other minorities. He then appealed to the isolationist mentality that plagues the island and said he wanted to protect hunters in Malta who were being bullied by larger EU countries to adopt a strict approach to hunting.

He later added this stance to his electoral manifesto for the European Parliament. The signature collection, after all, had all to do with Engerer’s electoral campaign to join the gravy train in Brussels. Again, that’s just a detail for a Labour Party with no principles, let alone consistency.

For a man who was once Sliema’s Nationalist deputy mayor, Engerer has come a long way since he left the PN. Much of what he has said and done does not do him much credit, which is why Labour is now his rightful home.

Today, Engerer is a consultant to the Civil Liberties Ministry and the Home Affairs and National Security Ministry, both appointments awarded on merit and competence, no doubt. He also chairs the government’s consultative council for LGBT rights, a tongue twister of an acronym that stands for the sexual tastes of various minority groups Engerer champions alongside minority hunters.

Labour leader Joseph Muscat had no problem embracing Engerer when he fell out with the PN, even though the latter at the time had a horrendous court case against him, involving accusations he had distributed obscene images of a former boyfriend. Muscat said the court case was a private matter.

He had to say that because, at the time, he was slowly turning his party into a mass movement of PN rejects, people with an axe to grind and lobby groups like those led by Engerer who confuse minority expectations with human rights.

Engerer was later acquitted from the accusations made by his former boyfriend, who said he had no further interest in pursuing the case.

There is no doubt that Engerer helped garner more than a few votes for the Labour Party as it shed its traditional leftist ideology and replaced it by a liberal platform best described as ‘identity politics’, a term that dates back decades and is today anything but progressive.

The concept of identity politics is to target ostensibly marginalised or oppressed groups with the aim of having them recognised for their differences, not in spite of them.

This terrible liberal ideology, masquerading as a voice for diversity, does away with the idea of individual human beings with their likes and dislikes and, instead, compartmentalises them into minority groups. The outcome of this thinking is that ridiculous talk of women’s rights and gay rights. There are no such rights. There are only human rights and they encompass everyone.

Engerer would not agree, as that would place his chairmanship of the LGBT consultancy group in jeopardy. Rather than stand up and insist on his right to be accepted as a human being, he evidently wants to be accepted as a gay.

Like his ‘bullied hunters’, he too feels persecuted. He claims that a former Nationalist minister refused to employ him because he was gay and, more recently, he accused the PN of homophobia at a sitting of a parliamentary committee discussing civil marriage.

There are only human rights and they encompass everyone

That is what happens when people insist on identifying themselves by their sexual orientation or by their difference from others. That is what happens when you apply Labour’s pigeonhole approach to minorities: liberalism accentuates the differences and not their acceptance.

Our Civil Liberties Minister, Helena Dalli, appears to share her consultant Engerer’s line of thinking. Only last week, she said her ministry was ‘consulting’ on changing the name of the the National Commission for the Promotion of Equality to Commission for Human Rights and Equality.

Now that doesn’t sound bad at face value, until you go on Dalli’s Facebook page and see a post she uploaded, quoting that eternal liberal Hillary Clinton as saying: “…being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights.”

No, they are not. Gays have the same human rights as everyone else and the faster this government stops pandering to this misconception, the better because identity politics is divisive.

Engerer’s decision to jump on the hunters’ bandwagon could not be worse timed. The Committee Against Bird Slaughter and Birdlife Malta have come out with very damning videos of illegal trapping around Malta and Gozo by Engerer’s minority group. The conservationists are lamenting the general lack of law enforcement and the slow police response to reports of abuse.

Meanwhile, the hunters’ federation said it was pleased that the government had accepted the gist of its proposals for the spring hunting season, including hunting on Sundays and public holidays.

The government issued two statements last Friday, significantly in English to target the middle class it claims to represent. In its now habitual doublespeak, the government said this year’s spring season is shorter because it shall start two days later. And, in the same breath, the government said there will be hunting on three Sundays and one public holiday, something that did not exist before.

Evidently, anyone wanting to go out with his kids in the countryside is to console himself that the overall number of hunting hours will decrease, or so the government claims.

Cynics would suggest that it would be better if the government provided our hunters, who are so fastidious about keeping rules, with stopwatches so they may all stop promptly at noon for the rest of the people to enjoy the countryside.

While they’re at it, it would also be nice to provide hunters with a calendar too, as the hunting season hasn’t started yet and they’re already out there.

In a separate statement, the government said that official hunting and trapping enforcement statistics for last year show a ‘drastic improvement’ when compared to 2012 figures. So, anyone who thought there was a post-2013 election fracas in our countryside by hunters who voted in droves for Labour must have been dreaming.

Either that or the government wants you to dream.

The solution to the hunting problem lies with the referendum proposal to abolish hunting altogether, starting with spring.

The government can’t be trusted to control the hunters it wooed so successfully before the election and this country has had enough of those minority hunters holding the countryside at ransom.

Those hunters certainly don’t look bullied when they’re out there brandishing their shotguns, as Engerer would have us believe. Quite the opposite.

As for the other minority Engerer loves to champion to the point of bullying, there is only one answer to that. Nobody cares what Engerer and his LGBT mates do in the bedroom. The less they talk about it, the better.

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