Many people are confusing the way they stack the issues about divorce in their minds in order to be able to make a decision about it at the polls. Some argue that the issue is a religio-social one. Others have described it as a purely civil one, yet others as a purely moral issue. Others yet appealed for us to think in terms of grey and not black or white while many see it as a majority-minority issue, deciding to come out for the forsaken and the victimised.

I contribute my share. This is not a matter of entertaining the grey area. It’s not a majority-minority issue, nor is it a religious one. It refers, rather, to whether we as a country should continue backing at law the traditional understanding of marriage, to which we are indebted for the stability it renders our society, or whether we don’t believe there is a relationship between our stability and the traditional marriage anymore... in which case we vote out its enshrinement at law.

Should we introduce divorce we are saying that we do not consider the traditional marriage as a contributory factor to our stability as a country, so much so that we target the downfall of its permanence and seal it at law.

It’s important that we do not confuse the stacking shelf where we deposit the divorce issue because otherwise we will not deal with it in the proper way. These last decades have reinforced the national idea that marriage gives stability to a country, meaning marriage upholds the common good for everyone. So to introduce divorce because Ms X and Mr Y failed in their marriage and need a second try is thinking inappropriately, because the nation should be the target of our decisions and not a sector of it, even if the majority is made up of Ms X and Mr Y. So divorce should be opted out of even purely from this point of view.

To prove how wise a no decision would be for us as a country we only need to see the statistics of all the countries around us. What stability has divorce introduced even to the many Mr Ys and Ms Xs? Statistics say that divorce in fact not only does not give success to the second marriage but the second marriage fails even more miserably than the first. We find that many do not even venture to marry again after the divorce and cohabitation thrives. Not only, but the harshest irony is that since people start seeing marriage as non-desirable, easy as it is to dissolve the bond, many opt not to go for it from the start, adding to the list of cohabitees those people who would never have had any obstacle whatsoever to getting married at law.

So in actual fact, who will gain from the divorce legislation? The plain answer is – no one. Divorce gives hope but fails miserably at delivering. Who loses with divorce? Everyone. We would lose the major contributory factor to our stability as a nation.