Yes, they do. And the situation is worse when the control freaks run the country and try to impose their personal views on everybody else, forcing them to live as they think best. Any politician who is tempted to try this, even if on the smallest of scales, should replay a newsreel of the Berlin Wall in December 1989, of the Romanian dictators meeting their fate at the end of a gun at around the same time, and of statues of Lenin and Stalin being hacked to bits as the Iron Curtain came down. People will always do what they want to do in the end, even if it takes generations to get their way, and even if they have to hack walls and politicians to bits to get there.

I say this because I get the distinct feeling that Malta is becoming less democratic and not more so. It feels like we’re trying to protect ourselves from the threat of an engulfing European liberalism by becoming more and more reactionary in our views and behaviour. The loudest voices to be heard in the public sphere are those of bigots telling us why Malta lights the way for European morality. The more liberal voices in Parliament are meek and silent on the backbenches. The front rows are a ruckus of hypocrisy and religion. Suddenly, even the Leader of the Opposition sees no need to discuss the trifling matter of divorce, and has told us that it is not an issue. Apparently, the fact that the Prime Minister smiles rather a lot is what he should be talking to us about right now. A smiley Prime Minister is a hot topic (what does that smile hide, eh?), but divorce is not. Meanwhile, the lives of people are in ferment, but the politicians don’t care because they are of one mind: if you ignore a problem for long enough, then it will go away or resolve itself. They’re nuts, of course. This problem will only be resolved when they resolve it by bringing us into line with the rest of the world.

Yes, people will always do what they want to do. No politician can stop them, except by deploying guns, torture, barbed wire and secret police. Divorce is a case in point. Politicians can stop people divorcing in Malta by refusing to enact divorce legislation, but they can’t stop Maltese people getting divorced abroad and more to the point, they can’t stop people leaving their marriages, setting up home with somebody else, and starting new families. The effects of divorce are here aplenty; it’s only the law that’s not. And yet you still have people who say that divorce will be the ruin of the country, as though the cancellation of a marriage by means of a piece of paper somehow has a more profound and dramatic effect than the departure of the spouse to set up home with somebody else. It’s not the piece of paper that hurts, but all the stuff that precedes it, and there are no laws to stop that happening. There can’t ever be because we would be spending all our time in Strasbourg, fighting cases. You can’t put policemen with machine-guns outside people’s houses to stop them from walking out on each other.

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Now it looks like the bigots in Parliament have been hoist by their own petard. The Law Courts have just ruled that a man who had surgery to become a woman can marry a man. Isn’t it wonderfully amusing? Malta is now the only place in the world where a man who has had surgery to become a woman can marry a woman who has had surgery to become a man, but they can’t get divorced because the morality police won’t allow it. I haven’t stopped laughing about this all day. We have scored a world first: transsexual marriage before divorce. It beats winning the Eurovision Song Contest, which is usually won by transsexuals anyway.

Miss X wanted to marry her boyfriend, but when she went to the Public Registry to ask for the marriage banns to be published, the director refused, on the grounds that she isn’t a real woman. Yet when you have an irreversible sex change operation, your gender is changed on your personal records, so Miss X is officially a woman and didn’t have to resort to anything as dramatic as lifting up her skirt in the face of the director of the public registry. Armed with identification papers issued by the Republic of Malta, declaring her to be of the female gender, Miss X dragged the lot of them kicking and screaming into court, and won. Judge Gino Camilleri pointed out that the Marriage Act allows marriage between two persons of the opposite sex who are not married to anyone else. Miss X is a woman who wants to marry a man. Neither is married to anyone else. Hence, he ruled, they can marry each other. And so it’s wedding bells for the happy pair.

***

Meanwhile, the little elves at the Ministry of Justice are probably spinning and weaving, trying to come up with a solution to the transsexual marriage problem – one that will spare our blushes in Europe’s corridors (“You want to block the divorce proposal when you permit transsexual marriage? You permit transsexual marriage but not transsexual divorce?”).

I suspect it won’t be long before a little amendment to the Marriage Act pops up in Parliament, piloted by Paul Vincenti’s little friend the deputy prime minister. I am on tenterhooks to see what kind of genius means he will employ to work out the impossible. Perhaps he will write to all the karate associations and floral clubs of Malta and Gozo for their support, as he did when he wanted their backing for his efforts at getting the criminality of abortion written into the Constitution.

The official papers of a man who has become a woman say “female”. The official papers of a woman who has become a man say “male”. Until this landmark ruling, despite the amended gender specification on their official papers, the government did not allow people who had had a sex change to marry others of the opposite sex. Nor were they allowed to marry people of the same sex, because that would be gay marriage and the law doesn’t permit it. So people who had undergone a sex change weren’t allowed to marry anyone at all. They couldn’t marry people of the opposite sex and they couldn’t marry people of the same sex. They couldn’t even marry each other, because the government and the public registry couldn’t decide how to work that one out.

It has taken the Law Courts to rule that if your papers say you are a woman, then you are allowed to marry a man. And if your papers say you are a man, then you are allowed to marry a woman. How or why you became a woman or a man is not the state’s business. Thank God for the separation of powers.