The proposed Gender Identity, Expression and Sex Characteristics Act attempts to make a case for equality and human rights by redefining the real meaning of these terms. This Bill, if enacted, will try to alter the meaning of family life in Malta. It will attempt to silence the voice of the Church because it cannot accept nor tolerate its teachings. It will also try to poison our children’s minds in schools by pushing ‘sexual health programmes’, including gay sex, on some misguided ploy of discrimination or homophobia.
According to the gender ideology, a man and women are not born so, but become so. In the name of ‘free choice’, one will be having the choice of one’s sex and sexual orientation. This means to arbitrarily decide whether he or she wants to be man or woman, to try to destroy the concept of male and female. No psychological, medical or any assessment would be needed to make such a choice. No age limits either.
At the tender age of 14, which is biologically, hormonally and psychologically a challenging and stressful time for any adolescent, our youths will be encouraged to experiment and subsequently choose their sex. Gender mainstreaming asserts that the differentiation into two sexes is only a construct of society.
The public needs to be aware that this law will try to change the innermost core of our social structure in society. This law does away with the concept of the human person, with an unchangeable sexuality integrally connected to the person. It’s about dissolving the identity of man and woman step by step as well as sexual standards and social forms based on marriage, family, motherhood and fatherhood. It does away with the differences between male and female as well as the complementarity of both sexes so beneficial to child development.
This Cultural Revolution is called ‘gender mainstreaming’. Once enacted, this Bill will have many ramifications, of which I would like to mention but a few. Any direct opposition to an active homosexualisation of society will not be tolerated.
Same-sex marriage would enshrine in law a public judgment that the desire of adults for families of choice outweighs the need of children for mothers and fathers. It would give sanction and approval to the creation of a motherless or fatherless family as a deliberately chosen ‘good’. Embryos would have to be created to accommodate demand, and the Embryo Protection law, which in Malta gives the maximum protection to the embryo in IVF procedures, would be sacrificed.
According to the gender ideology, a man and women are not born so, but become so
It will put increasing pressures on our schools to implement programmes embracing ‘diversity’ in the name of ‘equality’ but negating concepts of ‘sexual difference’, ‘male and female complementarity’ and natural law. Studies from brain scan research, sociology and psychology, which show the undeniable difference and the need for complementation of the male and female sexes, will be ignored. Bullying will be ‘used’ as a pretext for inserting the ‘gender ideology’ in school programmes.
What will happen to the rights of parents to make decisions about their children’s education, particularly on moral issues? Will parents be given the right to opt out if they do not wish that their children be thought these concepts as the norm? The concept of parents as primary educators, besides being a parental right, is also taught by the Church and was given emphasis by the late St Pope John Paul II.
What about the Church? The Church teaches that sexual activity between people of the same gender cannot be reconciled with its beliefs and doctrines. Although it has condemned all forms of hostility to any individual on the basis of her or his actual or perceived sexual orientation, the Church has been precise in its moral teachings.
The Catholic Church teaches that marriage is the lifelong, faithful, indissoluble bond open to life between one man and one woman. We are already seeing a growing intolerance experienced by Christians in many countries in Europe and the US.
I call on all serious MPs to read up on the malaise of gender ideology, before they embark on the discussion. The Church authorities must speak out. Religious freedom depends on this Bill being repealed; before we get to the stage when it would take an act of ‘courage’ to even say that the child’s father is a man and a woman, the mother.
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Miriam Sciberras is chairman of Life Network.