We have just through Holy Week before Easter and the island has been inundated with pageants and processions, Roman legionnaires and Apostles’ tables and visits to the seven churches and figolli and kwarezimal and what-not.
These are all external signs of the religion that the majority of the country professes to follow and they are good things if they help us approach a deeper depth of meditation and inner conversion towards God and our neighbours.
Alas I very much fear that most of us are happy being Catholic only as long as this sits within our comfort zone! Once we are challenged outside our comfort zone, we often find it very easy to deny the spirit of our religion and hang on to the external observances alone, while our hearts are often far from God. Most of us are just happy being closet Catholics.
I find it hard to understand how, during this Holy Week, the PL government that wants to see gay adoption no longer being an issue in a progressive society, moves through legislation on the equation of rights for the adoption of children by homosexual and heterosexual couples alike, de facto pushing through gay marriage in anything but name.
The Prime Minister seems to be happily declaring that this is another stake in the separation of Church-State relations. What it is, in effect, is another separation between the state and the common good by going against right reason and an anthropologically normative definition of marriage. The gay adoption of children being a practice that is still shrouded in much academic and clinical uncertainty, as opposed to the multiple repeated parrot-like sophist contradictions to the contrary, and in our Parliament, formed by our so many Catholic politicians, not one voice stands up to vote against this legislation. So many votes in favour, so many abstentions, no votes against!
I, for one, find this situation jarring no matter how many reasons and explanations are given by both parties and I am hereby voicing my discontent. Catholic politicians from the Labour Party had been very democratically told to shut up and put up, while the PN decided to establish its modus vivendi in showing unity through abstaining. Obviously, I disagree with this stance as, in my opinion, although there was no disagreement on civil union, there was enough gravity of the matter involved on the issue of gay adoption being put on the same footing as heterosexual adoption for the PN to have found its modus operandi by voting against the bill and then issuing a statement to clarify the position later.
This would have been more representative of the 80 per cent of the population that is purportedly against this bill, who have now been consequently rendered un-represented. Democracy is supposed to be a system of government that encompasses the greatest happiness for the greatest number while maintaining the fundamental natural rights (based on natural law) of the minority, including the rights of children!
I find objectionable a comment in the editorial of one of our prominent local newspapers bare-facedly declaring that these matters in hand should not be matters of conscience! Conscience is the ultimate arbiter of moral action, we say, even to the extent of the conscience being invincibly ignorant! How is it now that it has suddenly been demoted by unwise editorials or are we now scraping the bottom of the subjective barrel?
However, the comment that ultimately gets the prize this week is the one made by a PN party official who declared unknowingly that he was “looking forward to closing this chapter”, adding that the party “had to move on”! I do not expect him to be an expert in bioethics, but little does he know what is coming his way!
They say one can try to climb a storey in one big step, or may use many small steps instead. This is just the beginning once natural law has been discarded! The other issues will appear one step at a time: the “right” to bear children by gamete donation, surrogacy, cloning, genetic selection of sex and physical features and ultimately abortion and euthanasia all in the name of “rights” and a liberal approach. Bit by bit is how these “rights” are to be claimed, bit by bit is how those against can be condescending and abstain or accept!
As the PL has done in this case, it is going to do again and again with the other issues mentioned and some I did not even dare mention at all. The PN will be repeatedly forced into a serially defensive position in the same corner again and again, unless it is well prepared, and there are ways to prepare ourselves. The ways are, of course, there but I will only suggest them to the right ears if they are willing to listen.
When the PN bravely passed legislation on IVF, there was great pressure to legislate in favour of the freezing (and destruction) of human embryos from certain quarters. This pressure was rightly withstood, as it went against the most basic of natural rights. Because the PN in government was well prepared and had done its research well, a good IVF and embryo protection law was finally promulgated and passed unanimously through Parliament and today is showing the fruits of success.
While I am at it, it is expedient to point out that I, as chairman, was asked to resign, together with the rest of the Bioethics Committee, more than a year ago. The committee has not been reconstituted since. As a result, nobody from Malta is now participating in EU National Ethics Committees (NEC) meetings since one year. I should point out that when we have the Presidency of the Union, a meeting for the other state member national ethics committee has to be organised as part of our presidency duties which would be very difficult if we do not participate in these meetings at all! Oh by the way, happy Easter everyone!
Dr Michael Asciak MD, M.Phil, PhD
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