Please permit me to reply to Fr Joe Borg’s article ‘Avoiding the short cut to chaos’ (The Sunday Times of Malta, April 6) in which he chose to misinterpret something I had written in Times of Malta. I shall confine myself to two points.

First, of course President Emeritus George Abela had every right to his personal conscience. Abela could legitimately – and did – exercise his personal conscience, for example, in setting off on missionary work in Peru in the midst of political turbulence in Malta.

But it is an iron rule of parliamentary democracy that no President’s conscience can ever be allowed to intrude in the performance of his constitutional role. If personal conscience was to be his overriding guide, he should not have accepted that office in the first place.

In the case of the Civil Unions Bill, he was absolutely obliged by the supreme law of the constitution to sign any Bill without delay passed by the House of Representatives on Third Reading. No ifs or buts. He had a duty to do so. He let down his office by not doing so.

Secondly, Maltese law, based on European human rights case law, already allows single people to adopt. The gold standard for deciding adoption is laid down in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In line with this, Appoġġ stipulates that all adoption applications are treated equally, “ensuring that the applicant(s) can provide an environment that ensures the physical, emotional and psychological well-being of the minor to be adopted”.

Sexual orientation should not influence whether a person is allowed to adopt a child. His or her suitability cannot be determined by sexual orientation or marital status. All prospective adoptive parents, whether they are a couple or single, gay, bisexual or heterosexual, should undergo the same process and be allowed to adopt if they show themselves to be suitable parents.

This is the overriding criterion guiding Malta’s own civil union legislation. Only bigots could disagree.