Angela Abela is right. No wonder she stole the show at last week’s forum on national identity hosted by the President. Her point (as reported) that “the Maltese family is one of the strongest in the EU, and has not shown signs of weakening in recent years” is most certainly spot on.

There is but one truth when it comes to family: everything the people up north have and do, we have more and do better.

I’m sure most readers will have observed the state of utter depravity that people in the EU have sunk into. Given that strong families are the basis of a healthy economy, that should also explain why living conditions in EU countries are so dire compared with those in other regions.

I was having a beer at a Stammtisch in a German town the other day when I let slip that I was not donated to a compulsory state crèche at the age of two. I should have known better than to become the laughing stock for the rest of the evening.

My friends (at least that concept is still current, though more research is needed) couldn’t believe we still care about ‘that family nonsense’ in Malta.

In Germany, as in other EU countries, no one really gives a jot about marriage, parents, cousins, and such ‘archaic matters’. Rabid individualism is rife.

No longer do people travel long distances at Christmas to visit family. Things like gifts and inheritances are a thing of the past and the death of a family member is met with a singular lack of emotion, a raised eyebrow at best.

I have never felt so homesick as I did that evening. I may live on a tiny island but by gosh, my family is strong and tight-knit and valued and traditional and such.

Which is why it was so heart-warming to hear that the Maltese family shows no signs of deteriorating – from the Director of the Centre for Family Studies no less.

The pristine state of the art must be down to the efforts of a small but determined band of Maltese conservatives.

Take marriage. Conservatives continue to believe that marriage is the keystone of strong families. They want to encourage people to get married, and that includes those whose previous marriages haven’t quite worked. Now they’re even asking us to vote in a referendum to legislate for this.

Call them staid and bourgeois, conservatives are men and women of principle. The only thing on their minds is traditional marriage. They might just about accept some other form of partnership between a couple, but they privilege marriage above all else. As they see it, the institution has passed the test of time as the surest form of long-term commitment.

So steely are their values that they go so far as to recommend marriage for same-sex couples. I have in mind arch-conservatives like the Malta Gay Rights Movement’s Gaby Calleja.

Calleja apparently thinks that gay people should be brought into the fold of traditional society and occupy themselves with things like marriage certificates and rings and anniversaries.

So far so good news for our strong and resilient Maltese family. The problem is that Malta risks being taken over by liberal (for want of a better word) agitators. Their power over the media is astonishing and their ranks include several otherwise-upright and multi-titled men – as well as a loose collection of disc jockeys, television presenters, and so on.

Their power means that they’re crawling all over our newspapers and television screens, peddling their wares of dissoluteness and laxity. Even so, they tend to suffer from paranoia and persecution complexes. Cross them one bit and they will mumble something about crucifixes in classrooms and call you a fundamentalist, secularist, and bully.

Although they like to meddle in matters of sex and the body generally, the Great Enemy of liberals is marriage. Misled and blinded by corrupt values, they will stop at nothing to make a mockery of that most traditional of institutions.

Take a certain prominent liberal, who has said that the easiest answer to marital problems would be Las Vegas-style annulment.

That’s because, according to him (liberals tend to be men, which proves the age-old theory that women are genetically less enterprising and open-minded), most marriages would upon close inspection turn out to be the result of immature decisions and therefore null and void. The cheek, to put into question the validity of thousands of otherwise-solid marriages to indulge a liberal whim.

But even that is nothing compared with the extremism of other liberals. In their crusade to stop separated people from remarrying in the traditional way, some go so far as to say that Parliament should ‘regulate’ cohabitation. They say similar things about same-sex couples who, according to them, might be granted ‘partnership’ but not marriage rights.

The kind of dysfunctional future being proposed by these radicals is terrifying to say the least. They want a free world in which marriage gets infected by an ‘annulmentist’ mentality.

That’s the idea: first, that most marriages are in any case the products of immaturity and essentially worthless and, second, that proving this worthlessness is a song and should take about as long as making a cup of tea.

Besides, by encouraging cohabitation rather than remarriage, the state would be creating an army of poġġuti (cohabitants). Liberals like to call this the ‘common good’, by which I imagine they mean a freewheeling society with no time for traditional institutions.

Much as I relish the occasional subversive streak, I’m squarely with the conservatives on this one. I want to be able to feel special and privileged at the Stammtisch. It’s what makes me proud of my unique Maltese identity. Thank you, President George Abela, for bringing it up.

mafalzon@hotmail.com