For those of you who did not read my article last week, ketchup morals are those morals which are fine in theory, but fail or fall short in practice.

The term ketchup morals was inspired by the secretary who spilt ketchup on her boss lawyer’s trousers. She then left the office for her mother’s funeral and was amazed to find he had sent her an email demanding money to foot his dry cleaning bill. In theory he may have been right, but in practice it was crass and insensitive to demand payment.

So in the best form of revenge she just forwarded his email to all his fellow solicitors to make his face as bright red with embarrassment as that ketchup our kids love.

And of course in Malta, where there is a great big chasm between what we preach and what we practice, these ketchup morals take on a distinctly putrid flavour.

For some reason of late we have seen the rise and rise of the hard line extreme views, or perhaps these are the same people who are just feeling more confident about expressing it in newspapers and the media in general.

It all seems to have been triggered by the Norman Lowells of this world, who dared in the first European Parliament elections give vent to views we thought would garner little support and yet, among Malta’s underfulfilled and self important young men, these views are taking root.

I would say that with more and more African faces appearing around our main towns of Valletta and Sliema (which is creating huge levels of grumbling) the Norman Lowells (or at least his sentiments if not his political party) of this world, have more support than Alternattiva Demokratika, though few would dare express it openly.

It is a fact that perhaps few of us know but in last year’s EP election, many people gave ones and twos to AD on the same voting document as to the Norman Lowell camp, even though this was absolutely a crazy thing to do as normally green parties are very left and Norman Lowell’s kind of parties very right.

It is strange to think that Arnold Cassola nearly got elected also partly with the help of the Norman Lowell vote, (a fact AD does not publicise and I do not blame them because it is not their fault at all that the nutty anti-government vote got translated in this way).

Now we are going to remain with five MEPs thanks to the EU Constitution being firmly rejected, and so the sixth seat for AD is beginning to look very distant indeed.

Still on the subject of right and left, the extremes are often very similar. As Voltaire noticed when looking at a round of parliamentarians, the two extremes of right and left often do meet both physically and morally, although to be fair I would not call AD extreme lefties really, although some of their European cousins maybe are.

One article which was triggered by the Tonio Borg plan to enshrine the abortion ban in our Constitution told us that abortion is worse than paedophilia, because in Salvu Felice Pace’s amazing words: “Victims of paedophilia can be helped to rebuild shattered lives and many have been helped to lead a normal life.”

Even worse and so far uncommented on was his assertion that paedophilia is less terrible than abortion because paedophilia “can be the result of some psychological disturbance on the part of the offender”.

It isn’t it amazing that there are people out there who find reasons to excuse paedophilia, but presumably think all the women who have had abortions because of poverty or rape, or many other reasons are all petty killers?

To even think that women who have abortions are worse than paedophiles is as horrible a thought as one can have, and one that would make us the laughing stock of Europe if it did turn out to be a popular view.

I would love to know what the Maltese vote on Xarabank would make of such a choice and such a question. What is worse, paedophilia or abortion? Obviously it is a choice we should never even think about or even contemplate but speaking for myself, I would rather never have been born than even think about what children have to endure at the hands of paedophiles.

If someone had written something like this against dogs there would have been a spate of comments and defensive letters. But somehow paedophilia is something most of us refuse to even think about, or imagine anyone we know committing it, though it is not as rare as we think, and probably a lot more common than the amount of abortions Maltese women have.

I really do wonder what is gripping this island.

Mind you it is the fireworks season isn’t it, so all morals ketchup and otherwise go out of the window anyway at this time of year....