“Vox populi, vox Dei”, though you’ll kindly forgive the spelling, if I got it wrong, seems to be the watchword of some of our Honourable Members at the moment, who seem to have forgotten however that we put them into office to legislate, not to ask us for our opinion if something comes up that exercises them.

Let’s not beat around the bush too much, shall we?

I strongly suspect, nay, I am morally convinced, much as dear old Fredu Sant used to be, that the only reason why the Honourable Ones are jumping onto this referendum about divorce bandwagon with such alacrity is simply that they’d rather not decide the question themselves, it being a two-edged sword of remarkably sharp edges.

They’re damned if they do and they’re damned if they don’t is what they must be feeling, and I’m not talking about the damnation of their eternal souls, either. So confused are the signals from the great unwashed, with even the so-called progressive University students not exactly coming out clearly in favour of divorce (Heaven help us) that your common or garden MP is not really able to discern whether voting “ay” or “nay” is going to get him or her more votes at the bottom line.

If you want evidence of this, just consider the vacillation of a number of people who seemed to be pretty hard and fast on one or the other side of the equation.

The Hon. Jeffery Pullicino Orlando, who started this thing off by grabbing a large purring feline and chucking it in amongst the flying rats that infest Valletta and turn my car into a latrine, seems to think that a referendum is not such a bad thing.

I say this because he came out of a private meeting with the PM spreading beans around with jolly abandon, saying that a referendum is going to be held next year, with nary a thought as to how this makes him look.

To start with, it makes him look a bit less than fully au fait with how things are done. You don’t, as far as I’m concerned, have a meeting with your Prime Minister, and the leader of your party to boot, and then swan around telling everyone what you talked about.

Contrast this behaviour with that of various other MPs, who had also shown some desire to be given consideration. You know the ones I mean, people like the Hon. Franco Debono, who no doubt had his own meetings with the PM but didn’t think he had the right to broadcast the discussion to the four winds.

And then, to make matters more embarrassing for JPO, as he has become fondly known in the tabloidery, the PM had to come out and put a damper on the idea that a referendum was necessarily going to be held at all.

Getting back to the subject of referendums (or referenda) I have to wonder out loud why JPO (it’s more convenient to type three letters, anyway) thinks that having one is a good idea, when it was he who proposed the idea that the law should be changed. When an MP voices the idea, and a darn good one it is too, that the law should be changed to allow divorce, you don’t really expect him to look so pleased that instead of legislating, the House will be asking us to do the job for them.

By this point in the proceedings, you might be getting a bit confused, and I don’t blame you.

Is there going to be a referendum or not? More to the point, should there be one?

In answer to the latter question, obviously not, the House should resolve immediately if not sooner to discuss the question of whether to allow the dissolution of civil marriage by means of divorce proceedings in the civil courts of the Republic and then legislate accordingly, the answer being clearly “yes”.

It is probably a waste of bandwidth for me to say it, but legislating in this sense is not legislating in favour of divorce per se. Divorce, or a similar smelling rose by another name, already exists anyway, in some form or other, either by adoption of the Byzantine contortions of the annulment semi-fiction, or by the registration of foreign divorces, and no-one has ever pointed the finger of mortal sin and eternal damnation at anyone participating in such shenanigans.

All that we, the ones who are not blinded by the sleight of hand that the anti-divorce lobby is adopting, are asking for is for the civil law to allow dissolution of civil marriage within a properly established structure that protects the interests of all concerned.

If, in the face of any logic at all, there’s to be a referendum anyway, i shall do my level best to persuade you to vote yes and I shall vote yes myself, even if some old codger in a frock threatens my immortal soul with eternal damnation.

But we really shouldn’t be wasting time voting on it, it’s not our job.