The phrase that betrays you as a racist, or a bigot generally, is the one that goes "I'm not a ..., but ...", as anyone with even the slightest ear for nuance knows.   Sometimes, to be fair, the wording is employed by people who mean well and have genuine concerns, their slip from their own normally high standards of tolerance and humanity being caused by a failure, to which we are all prone, to think things through.

So when someone says something on the lines of "I'm not a racist, but people wearing burkas worry me, because they could be terrorists" I'm prepared to let it slide, most times, because I can see that the bloke concerned (they're mainly blokes, women tend to be less judgemental, unless they're wives) hasn't actually taken the trouble to consider how many terrorist have - in the real world - truly been carried out by means of someone wearing a burka sneaking a bomb under the cover of the clothing.

But people in positions of public influence have the responsibility to think things through, because what they say is more relevant than the mumbling of someone having a conversation in a bar or on the church parvis.

Consequently, our Minister for Pandering to Every Minority Under the Sun should have measured her words before adding fuel to the poisonous debate about burka wearing.  I'm no fan of the burka, to be frank, because it symbolises too much that's fundamentalist and harmful, but if someone chooses to wear it, at the end of the day it's her choice, not mine, as long as she doesn't scare the horses or alarm the servants. 

You'll have to look up the allusion, I can't spoon feed you everything. Failure to think things through gets all sorts of people into all sorts of bother.

BACKTRACKING

Evarist Bartolo, who when he distances himself from his "Maria l-Maws" manifestation isn't an entirely unreasonable bloke (though he supported too many regressive Labour policies in the past) has now had to backtrack - or look like he has, which is the same thing - on the distribution of non-mainstream sexuality literature in schools. 

I'm not even sure that my own description of the genre isn't somewhat intolerant itself, I don't pretend to be perfect.

The snag is that Bartolo now looks like he's done this because he has had to bow down to the intolerant and bigoted sentiments of people who, in different contexts, have shown themselves to be intolerant of other races and beliefs.  Whether or not this is a valid interpretation of Bartolo's "clarification" is not the point: it's what it looks like, therefore that is what it is, for most people.

People like me, perhaps opportunistically, start to wonder out loud if this wasn't because Bartolo did some sums and noticed that there are more votes in making nice to the bigots.  It's like "Peanuts" Scicluna, in a different context, looking like he backtracked on a Budget measure that restricted the use of vintage cars to the weekend only: as soon as the moaning started, we got the "oops, sorry, wrong document" excuse trotted out.

We're supposed to be being led, governed, ruled over, imposed on, call it what you like, by people who are qualified to do so, by people who have the faculties to think things through, not by people who twist and turn in reaction to the slings and arrows of fortune.

PLIGHT

I've just spent three hours or so at the St James Cinema, watching a superb production of Hamlet from NTLive.  At the end of it, Benedict Cummerbatch, a star of cosmic proportions, brought tears to my eyes (seriously) when he quoted a poem on the plight of refugees. 

The closing line alone, "a parent only puts their child on a boat when the sea is safer than the land", serves as the best example of how people who screech about the dangers to our comfortable existence of refugees from terror should stop and think.

The problem is, most of the bigots and the xenophobes don't have the wherewithal to do that little thing.