Everybody is having conniptions at the fact that gays are going to be allowed to get married and, horror of horrors, adopt children. Let’s get things straight (forgive me).
The Bill that President Emeritus George Abela had apparently made it clear that he will refuse to sign into law regulates same-sex unions, which smells the same as any other rose but isn’t precisely marriage.
Moving on, I know of a number of gays who have adopted children already and the world hasn’t stopped turning on its axis and the children haven’t turned out to be serial killers.
Those are the cold, dry facts but they don’t give the full story.
Starting with Abela’s imitation of President Charles de Gaulle (“non”, though not to civil unions but to the Brits joining the Common Market) this raises a number of cogent questions, not least of which the one that asks whether it isn’t time for us to be given chapter and verse on what actually happened? I know we’re blessed with a prime minister who chooses his jousts with the media very, very carefully, opting to announce his shuffling by Tweet and osmosis but some things, such as the onset of a possible constitutional crisis, need ventilation not opportunism.
Abela has every right to be troubled by a Bill that was/was not put before him for signature into law. Whether he is right to be troubled is not pertinent to the issue, that is for him and his conscience, but if his conscience was troubling him to the extent that he felt he had to make it clear (to the prime minister if to no-one else) that he would not sign the Bill despite being mandated so to do by Constitutional text and convention, his only way forward, as I’ve pointed out previously, was to resign, honourably, even if there were only 10 minutes left on his watch.
After all, if one’s conscience is strong enough to fly in the face of the Constitution, then it is strong enough to require resignation, a resignation, to boot that would have been seen as the choice of a man strong enough to stand up to be counted.
However, as things seem to have played out, Abela was never put in a position that required him to stand up because the prime minister fudged the issue by leaving the Bill “in discussion”.
If one’s conscience is strong enough to fly in the face of the Constitution, then it is strong enough to require resignation
While this was a cute stratagem to avoid red faces, it was not really one the prime minister was free to adopt: the Constitution isn’t his and if taking a Bill to the president would provoke a tussle, then he should have entered the fray.
It is by surviving these things that a Constitution develops sinews, not by one of its major players ducking out because it was convenient to do so.
Should one’s conscience be pricked by the Bill, it must be asked.
I have no issues with two individuals who love each other plighting their troth and all that, with or without confetti and a big party, and if the State is called on to recognise that union and give it legal strength, I have no issues either. And if anyone wants to call that marriage, hey, great, go for it, amend the Bill before it’s signed into law as far as I am concerned.
That said, it is clear that mine is not a position that is espoused unanimously, either here or in many other parts of the world. Even in so-called liberal countries, the idea of man and man or woman and woman taking the place of man and wife (even that phrase is telling) raises hackles and gets people all hot and bothered under the collar.
It’s about time, then, for all the people who get so strident and shouty about the right to same-sex union being a “human right” and other fine sentiments to calm down a little. It’s not, not yet, anyway.
Which brings us neatly to that moderately peculiar fellow, Gordon-John Manché and his ‘River of Love’ bunch. I’ve not met the bloke, and have no wish to, and the few minutes I’ve seen him on the box have given me flesh-crawl to the nth degree, especially bearing in mind his notions about how gays can be cured. I find his ‘River of Love’ movement equally worrying because it seems to have as much a connection with love as your nearest people’s democratic republic has with democracy.
All of the above, however, does not deprive them of the right to get up a petition against the law allowing gay marriage and/or gay adoption. They are wrong to be against either, because – forgive the gloopiness – love does indeed conquer all and it is far, far better for the common good for love, of other individuals and/or of children in need of it, to be properly recognised and ‘regulated’ but being wrong doesn’t mean you are banned from exercising your legal rights.
Otherwise, ours would be the sort of dictatorship that the Federation of Oxymoronic Hunters would like us to live in, where a goodly chunk of citizens can’t exercise their right to petition against spring hunting (against all hunting, if I had my way).
We must, of course, go all out to defeat Manché and his ludicrous ideas, to have them consigned to the scrap heap of history once and for all, but the way to do this is not to try to stop them and their silly petition in its tracks but to let it fail. If, by some weird combination of events, they get as far as provoking a referendum on the question, then we have to fight to get the electorate to show them the way out.
If we don’t manage to do that, well, hey, this is a democracy and we can always try to get the courts, all the way to the ECHR if necessary, to decide, democratically and after due process, that the unacceptable view of the majority can’t be allowed to impose itself on the minority, unless there are cogent reasons for this to happen.
You might think that this would undermine democracy, the sort of thing that one could resort to in order to rid the country of a government that was voted in by the majority. It doesn’t quite work that way, as a bit of thought will demonstrate to you. On the other hand, maybe that’s a way to get us shot of JM and his pack of cards.
No, perish the thought.
Nourishment of the edible kind was had at a couple of places we’ve been to before but it’s nice to be able to report that standards have been upheld.
Il-Fliegu I’ve mentioned relatively recently and we had lunch there on Sunday – still great. Monday, being the day when we commemorate the day the lease ran out and the tenants left, we had lunch at Sicilia Bella, again an old favourite and, again, still great.
Intellectual nourishment was not had over last weekend, for various reasons not least of which is the one that dictates that Ġensna Remixed, even sans La Spiteri, was not something to be attended.
The next show to commemorate the end of the rent, Brian May’s candlelit supper (I’m using his own website for inspiration, and only kidding, before anyone gets all uppity) will also be given a miss, partly because I’ve already heard a load of Queen covers during We Will Rock You.
While on the subject of May, I wonder what he thinks about the way his hosts (our government, mark you) have cozied up to the bird killers, conservationists that they are. May is an avid fighter for animal rights and I’m sure he’s not amused with the fact that he’s here just as spring, and its attendant lead shot, is in the air.
imbocca@gmail.com
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20