Gift of Life has unwittingly given Labour MEP candidate Sharon Ellul Bonici its own gift.
This group, which wants to entrench an anti-abortion clause in our Constitution, has come down on Sharon like the proverbial tonne of bricks. Why, you may ask, did she commit a crime? Well, if GoL has its way, it seems that even joining a Facebook group, which is against religious fundamentalism and is pro-choice, would be considered against the law. Covering its mouth in horror, GoL ran screaming to Joseph Muscat, demanding that he “do something” about the wayward Sharon for daring to not only join the group “Let’s stop religious fundamentalism... say no to the Gift of Life proposal” – but she also had the gall to post a comment. Does this woman have no shame?
GoL threatened, it stamped its feet, it attempted blackmail, but to no avail. Sharon would not do as it asked, which was to retract her Facebook comment or else “face the consequences” (cue ominous music). GoL’s imperious demand to the Labour leader was that Sharon should not be allowed to contest the MEP elections.
The online comments to this story have been an eye opener. Not only did most readers not support GoL’s position, but they are also aghast at the implications.
Many have grasped what is at stake here – it’s not really about abortion (which, as we keep reminding everyone, is illegal in Malta) – it’s about a group of men wanting to force their beliefs down our throats and into our laws. GoL has made some headway with politicians who are afraid of losing votes, but when it doesn’t succeed in bullying the rest of us into meekly accepting what it is proposing, it resorts to a different tactic – the use of intimidation and fear.
What it has failed to gauge however, is that public reaction to the very emotional and personal issue of abortion is not as cut and dried, as it would like to have us think. Not everyone is able to truthfully say, “Abortion? Never!” because whether GoL likes it or not, there are people in Malta who reason, “Abortion? Well, it depends”. Some women simply keep their mouths shut because they have travelled to England or Sicily to have an abortion but would never dream of telling people because of the vicious judgemental backlash.
And that is why, with this latest antic, GoL has handed Sharon a gift. People who were not convinced about voting for her, are now voicing their admiration. Others, who were against her because she campaigned against EU membership, are now re-evaluating their estimation of her. This woman, many have concluded, has guts.
The sinister way in which GoL has acted towards Sharon does not bode well for the direction this country is taking. Her relatively mild comment on Facebook in which she simply stated a known fact has been twisted into something else entirely. She wrote:
“The State should not constrain a woman from terminating her pregnancy, let alone entrench it in our Constitution. The situation in Malta is not tragic only because abortion is available elsewhere in Europe. Had this not been so, we would have faced a tragedy, with underground abortions and their consequences.”
The deliberate misinterpretation: that she is advocating for Malta to introduce abortion. Apart from being false, this is also impossible, given that both major parties are flatly against it.
Fanatics always scare me: be they religious, political or football-mad. They are impossible to converse with, but what is worse, they want to forcefully wrestle your mind to come round to their way of thinking. It is this dogmatic, frenzied approach that is going to be GoL’s undoing.
One of the most telling comments I read online came from a man who said that while he was against abortion, the fact that he was screamed at by a member of GoL because he did not sign its petition put him off.
It is significant that with this latest publicity stunt (because that’s what it is) GoL has inadvertently caused a lot of pro-choice people to “come out of the woodwork”.
When I created this Facebook group (yes, GoL it was me, are you going to run me out of town?) I wanted to test the waters to see what people really feel about this subject. I only sent the invitation to join the group to a few people whom I knew were like-minded, but to my surprise it immediately grew to over 300 people. Clearly, I was not the only one who believed that GoL had no business fiddling around with our Constitution. I was also not alone in feeling that people who are pro-choice (which by the way, does not necessarily mean pro-abortion) didn’t have a voice.
Ironically enough, however, it is not the Facebook group that has given them a voice, but GoL itself.
So thanks, GoL, you’ve been swell.
Define liberal
The discussion about divorce has been torpedoed even before it’s begun, another indication that we have been lumped with the most rigidly conservative government since the 1960s. Social Affairs Minister John Dalli has been reported as saying that “the time is not ripe” for a divorce debate. I wonder when the time will be ripe – perhaps when the whole country has exchanged spouses and set up home together.
Welcome to post-EU, post-Eddie, post-Gonzi liberal Malta. Doesn’t it make you proud to know that our politicians cannot separate their own religious beliefs from the laws of the land? That our inability to separate Church and State ranks right up there with those whom we love to mock, i.e. certain fundamentalist Muslim countries?
Despite evidence to the contrary, people still blithely go around proclaiming that, “the majority of the Maltese are Catholic”. I find this a distortion of reality: if you are a lapsed Catholic you cannot define yourself by your faith because the whole point of believing in a religion is practising its rites and rituals. I would hazard a guess that roughly 50 per cent of Maltese people devoutly adhere to their religion, so where does that leave the other half? I guess they are compelled to bow their heads when Catholic dogma and State laws become one and the same.
It leads you to wonder whether the Church is running the country.
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