I appreciate Tommy Vella’s reply A Mandate On Divorce Was The Best Way To Go to my piece A Truly Misleading Argument (April 8), and in this regard I wish to make two remarks.

The examples (more than one) I gave of loaded questions are by no means the only ones there are. As Mr Vella claims “…if a question is worded in a way to entice an answer that you want, that would also be a loaded question…”

However, a question may be “loaded” not merely if one qualifies the question in a certain way. It may be equally loaded (on the same analogy of one who loads the dice to get the result s/he desires) if the question is purposefully vague. In my piece I gave the example of someone who for some reason is against medical amputation asking the public the question “Are you in favour people cutting off parts of other people’s body?” Wording a question regarding a very specific type of “cutting off” (namely medical amputation) in this vague and general way is as loaded as it can be.

I leave it to readers to judge whether loaded or not would be a vague question like “Are you in favour of divorce?” (when in fact a much more specific draft law is being presented to Parliament), in a society where two major institutions (Church and PN) can (and are) use (using) their propagandistic machinery to raise the ghosts of a Las Vegas-type of termination of marriage whenever the word divorce is uttered, and where no similarly large organisation possesses/is using an equally effective propagandistic machinery to counter this. Whether, given such a context, a no answer would be more readily given.

Mr Vella also refers to the guarantee which, according to him, is only a “provision for maintenance”; a far cry from the “adequate maintenance…” I mentioned; adding that “…if you ask any lawyer he will tell you that maintenance can never be guaranteed…”

The law being proposed, as any other law involving payment or funds, gives one a legal guarantee; it cannot go beyond this. But this is not a shortcoming of the law being proposed as such; it is a shortcoming of any law involving payment. Take the case of Paul who loaned Peter money that the latter refuses to pay back. Provided law courts establish that Paul has a legal right to that money, it is not evident that Peter will pay back the sum in question if, for instance, he no longer has any money or source of income.

The same holds with regards to separation; John may be ordered to pay Mary maintenance which he will never effectively pay if, for instance, he has no job or income that allows him to pay.

So while Mr Vella has a point in claiming that a legal right will not in each case entail the “materialisation” of the right in question – something which, as I said, is not peculiar to the divorce law being proposed – it is still important to include this right in the draft law on which we shall be asked to vote, in order to legally grant it to those entitled to it.

Asking a vaguer question like “are you in favour of divorce” and assuming a successful yes vote in the coming referendum would, on the other hand, give this or a future Parliament the popular legitimacy to enact any irresponsible divorce law it might desire to enact.