The substitution of Article 15 of the Marriage Act, which will be debated in Parliament this evening, will grant marriage equality to homosexual couples by removing the terms ‘wife’, ‘husband’, ‘him’, and ‘her’ and replacing them with gender neutral terms.

Article 15 will now read as follows:

“During the ceremony, the Registrar or other officiating officer shall ask each of the persons to be married, first to one of them and then to the other, whether that person will take the other as such person’s spouse, and upon the declaration of each of such persons that they so will, made without any condition or qualification, the Registrar or other officiating officer shall declare them to be spouses.”

The main aim of this Bill, the act reads, is to modernise the institution of marriage and ensure that all consenting, adult couples have the legal right to enter into marriage.

Amendments to the Civil Union Act, will also allow partners who have entered into a civil union prior to the legislation coming force to convert their civil union into marriage, within a period of five years.

The Nationalist Party has already announced that it will be voting in favour of the amendments, as it had already featured within their manifesto for this year’s general election.

However, sources within the Nationalist Party have told The Malta Independent, that the parliamentary group will seek amendments that will not remove terms like ‘husband’ and ‘wife’, but rather add on to the legislation to include homosexual couples.

The newsroom has also been informed that four MPs within the Nationalist Party requested a free vote, however they were told to follow the party line.

On the other hand, Archbishop Charles Scicluna has expressed objection to the amendments in  a homily for the feast of St Nicholas in Siggiewi, saying that the Church respected homosexuals but marriage should always be a union between people of a different sex.

He also objected to the removal of the terms ‘husband’, ‘wife’, "man", "woman", "father", and "mother". 

The amendments, however, will grant protection to Religious authorities, as the Act does not oblige any official of religious body to solemnise a particular form of marriage which is not recognised by that particular faith.

The remainder of the amendments in the Marriage Act, Civil Unions Act, Civil Code, Code of Organisation and Civil Procedure, Criminal Code, Interpretation Act, will see terms like husband, wife, mother, father, brother, and sister be replaced by gender neutral terms such as ‘spouse’, ‘parents’, and ‘siblings’.