It is a great pity that the campaign leading up to the referendum on divorce has been tarnished by traits of fundamentalism from the anti-divorce camp – and this is meant in the wider picture, and not specifically, or only, to the Moviment Żwieġ Bla Divorzju.

Very often, speakers from the ‘No’ camp have resorted to scaremongering tactics that are simply aimed to instil fear in all those who are thinking of voting ‘Yes’ on Saturday. They have spoken loudly in religious terms, brandishing Bibles and beating their chests as if they had some sacrosanct right to impose their beliefs on others. They have not realised that we are not dealing with religion, but with a civil right.

Through their actions, they may have caused more damage than good to their cause, as people today are no longer led by the nose. Similarly, that government communications coordinator who yesterday sent a number of messages to some of our female journalists with a veiled insult to their intelligence did not do a favour to the ‘No’ camp he supports.

People against divorce, in a strange twist, are in favour of cohabitation – because people who cannot remarry are forced into cohabiting with their partner, which does not give them the same rights as others who are married. So those people who are using religion as the basis of their arguments are basically insisting that people should cohabit, which at the end of the day goes against the teachings of the Church, which calls such relationships as being “in sin”.

People today have a mind of their own. In the past they may have succumbed to such imposition, but today it pushes them in the other direction.

People today do not accept what is thrown at them without asking questions. And yet these fundamentalists believe that they have some kind of authority to impose what they think on the rest of the population. They are wrong.

Today, people reason things out. They know that marriage breakdowns are causing great suffering to those people in such situations, and would like to give them a chance to start afresh. They have seen relatives and friends suffering because their relationship collapsed, and would like to see them in a new, happy relationship. They might be happily married themselves, and they would like to give others who were not so lucky the opportunity for a second chance.