The recent decision of our courts to allow transsexuals to marry, as well as the nice new Archbishop's apparent stance in favour of the state offering more recognition to cohabiting couples both show how much a simplistic anti-divorce, or divorce-is-the-root-of-all-evil stance is going to turn out to be a huge unsolvable headache for Malta's legislators.

In our determination to be, as James Debono of Malta Today wrote lately, "living fossils", are we really getting our knickers in a terrible twist?

The first example of this is because after having to endure the sort of famous actress Brigitte Nielsen marrying for the sixth time here because we recognise foreign divorce, are we now also about to allow gay marriage of a sort before allowing divorce?

And the second, because although the Church might be in favour of giving "married people rights" to cohabiting couples, it may well, unintentionally of course, be undermining the desirability or necessity to marry, something which happens when you have policies based not on human nature and human needs and the intelligent interpretation of these needs, but on rigid rules that do not reflect normal life and were never part of the essentials of the words of Jesus anyway.

Incidentally if I read another letter saying the "what God has put together let no man put asunder" means that those who marry civilly absurdly cannot divorce I will sigh... as opposed to scream!

Is it really a good idea to give cohabiting couples all the rights of married ones? Is that why our political parties are sensibly stalling on this one? Is that preferable to allowing divorce and allowing people to remarry? This cohabiting rights policy is clearly a way to try and keep a lid on things, but it may well backfire quicker than we think and the reason is simple. If there are no advantages to getting married, people won't do it. And fewer and fewer people are doing it in some of the world's more advanced democracies where cohabiting couples were given practically the same status as married couples.

In the UK, for example, the number of children born to unmarried and married couples is almost indistinguishable, and many are avoiding the hassle, formal commitment and expense of marriage. Some of the social results of this kind of thinking have recently been illustrated by studies which show that UK kids are probably the least well-served of all kids in Europe. Many, many commentators there believe the government should be strengthening the institution of marriage. And you don't do this by either never allowing people to remarry, as we are very foolishly doing here, or giving cohabiting couples the same rights.

You do it by encouraging people to marry, and sometimes to remarry, particularly if they are going to bring children into this world. Kids like their parents to be married. Kids like a family life where people have made a commitment to each other, but the state also has to recognise that marriages do not always work, and to deny remarriage is actually an anti-marriage stance which our Church will one day have to recognise too, just as it will eventually allow women to be priests or allow its own priests to marry when it runs out of Third World countries to recruit priests, or realises why this priests-can't-marry-rule may partly be what attracts so many gays to the priesthood.

This policy of having marriage and cohabitation as practically indistinguishable has been proved to be mistaken. It is indeed strange that the far right-wingers who tend to be pro-Church and the extreme lefties (not locally) agree on this one, but we shouldn't be too surprised, should we? Wasn't it Voltaire who looked at the French parliament of the time and commented dryly that the extreme right and left who sat in a circle met up?

If we believe all we are told about marriage it appears we should be allowing people to formalise their union in marriage. Although not everyone remains married, most people do. Cohabiting couples are far, far more likely to break up than married ones, so it really is quite an anti family policy we have here – one which doesn't allow divorce so people can remarry.

We absurdly allow the horrid bit, the marriage break up, but forbid the positive bit, the desire people have to remarry and try again. In every area of life you are allowed to make a mistake and try again. Why not with marriage? And somehow being married does make it harder for you to split up. And marriage has been proved to be a healthy state which is good for men, good for women and good for children. If marriage is made too onerous, not least that you cannot leave and remarry even if your husband thumps you, or your wife is a serial adulteress who went beyond sexting, if your husband is a convicted paedophile or your wife a conniving bully who only married you for your money, then people will just cohabit.

Those who are pro-Church and believe everything the Church says is God's word are not a majority in this country anymore and that is entirely a good thing because the Church has often been wrong and has changed its mind about loads of things. Recent attitude surveys show this clearly. But we are all, almost unanimously culturally Catholic.

We recognise the value of family and of love and respect towards each other.

I think our political parties are going to have to think long and hard before either going down the rights to cohabitation route or more of the same.

The court judgements this week both with regard to foreigners in their tangas and the rights of transsexuals show that both our tangas and knickers are in an awful twist, and it is going to take more from our legislators than a blind reliance on Church dogma to find a reasonable way out of the mess we are in.

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