Whoever told Daphne “women whose child-bearing years are long past are urged to have sex with their husband on demand (my italics) ‘because it is their duty’?” (TMIS, 19 August). Who is it that urges such a thing? I, for one, have never heard anything of the kind, and I would say it goes completely against Catholic teaching.

As for Daphne’s boast that she “threw away her copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church before she left school, having had absolutely no interest in it”, I suppose that puts her on the same level, intellectually, as the growing number of people who tell me they no longer read her column because they can’t stand her superior tone and her insults to all they hold sacred any more.

If deciding what was right or wrong, or even what right and wrong actually meant, were as simple and straightforward as Daphne seems to suggest, then it would be difficult to explain why all the world’s great minds since Socrates and Plato have wrestled with such questions, and why, for instance, many hospitals nowadays find it necessary to employ philosophers to guide them on ethical matters.

Daphne seems to be mainly interested in the legality of behaviour, and not in morality. Well, that is her business. But she cannot take it against people just because they are more interested in ethics and morality than in the law.

In any case, although morality and legality are conceptually distinct, they cannot be completely unrelated either. One would expect a country’s laws to reflect its moral values. Neither can one say that the former are more important than the latter, for then how would we be able to judge which laws were just and which were unjust, which needed amending and which didn’t?

Anton Caruana Galizia

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