It’s fascinating what takes the fancy of the public at large, and for that matter what takes the fancy of your average columnist.

For instance, the Prime Minister’s unashamed leap onto the LGBTQ bandwagon, where a good number of votes was perceived, with the concomitant tacking-on of adoption to the civil union bill, now law, went unremarked by most people. I don’t jump with the common masses, to quote some line or other out of The Merchant, and don’t include She Who Must Not Be Mentioned either, but for most other people, the important single issue raised by the civil union bill wasn’t Muscat’s antics but the Nationalist Party’s failure to vote in favour of it.

I mean, seriously, people? The Opposition, with clearly explained and - I confess in my case with hindsight - cogently argued reservations on the adoption aspects of the Bill, simply abstained. They did not vote against, they did not obstruct the Bill materially, they simply abstained, because of the reservations that many in the country also have.

For this they have been pilloried, on Sunday morning by none other than Lino Spiteri, whose selective vision on most aspects of our history is renowned (to be fair, we all have selective vision, it’s what makes us human) caused him to pillory the Nationalists because they failed to stand up and be counted when it came to granting rights to a minority.

Spiteri failed to twig, reasonably enough because no-one, Nationalists included, highlighted it, that the PN had voted in favour of Constitutional amendments seeking to guarantee non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

No, what was important in this whole thing was the “failure” of the Nats to vote for same-sex adoptions because, according to jerking knees and jiggers to tunes called by Joseph, Our Joseph, this denies rights to a minority.

Sorry to disappoint you, folks, leaving same-sex adoptions on the back-burner for some more time would not have “denied” any rights to any minority.

In fact, it might have guaranteed the right of a group that really needs it (the children) to have their case properly studied. You, and I, and anyone else, do not have a “right” to have a family, we cannot be denied having one if we are capable of having one, but any other arrangement, such as adoption, surrogacy and whatever, is subordinate to the right of the children concerned to have the best possible arrangements made in their interests and no-one else’s.

On a much less important, but no less visible plane, if you take the chattering classes at face value, is the type of attention being given to the celebrations accompanying the fiftieth anniversary of Independence (the only important one) and the other anniversaries that were conveniently tacked on to stop Labour’s diehards whining about Independence being celebrated.

Instead of a proper discussion on the manner in which Muscat is cunningly disguising his, and his Party’s, role in our history, soon to transmogrify into being the saviour of the country by driving out the British, beheading the Queen, taking us all-conquering into Europe and vanquishing the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the attention of the chattering classes is taken up by silly gossip about who is organising the concerts and why he’s doing that.

You might think I’m sticking up for a friend, which is true to the extent I do subscribe to the perhaps odd notion that friends, like puppies, are not just for Xmas, but the fact that Lou Bondi is having some fun organising a rock concert (well, more pop than rock, but anyway) or six is not the be-all and end-all of the things that should be discussed. And nor, horror of horrors, is the fact that he gets paid for his time and expertise, because you know, like everyone else, he lives on air and the satisfaction of thinking he’s right and everyone else is wrong.

How about, for instance, having a good old bitch and moan about the environment, raped to its roots by this bunch, about the sale of our citizenship, still anonymous despite what the EU has been promised, about the wholesale betrayal of the Taghna Lkoll slogan that Muscat got himself elected on, and about the looming shadow of economic troubles and rising unemployment, to mention but a few?

Get your priorities straight, folks, because they’re not someone else’s and it’s time we started to smell the coffee.