Can we please leave the Catholic Church out of the equation when debating divorce legislation? The Catholic Church is not the legislator. Parliament is the legislator.

When arguing or negotiating for divorce legislation, it is not the Catholic Church we have to convince that the situation has now gone beyond the point where we can carry on with the status quo, but the majority of members of parliament, on both sides of the house.

Those who are pressing for divorce legislation make the mistake of keeping their eyes on the wrong ball. The ball they need to be looking at is parliament and not the Catholic Church - still less ‘the Maltese Church’, because there is no such thing. The Catholic Church is one, and it is run from the Vatican.

By repeatedly addressing their arguments to the Catholic Church, those who lobby for divorce legislation demonstrate that they are subject to the same failing of which they accuse legislators: the belief that the real authority in this country is not parliament but the Archbishop’s Curia.

Let’s leave the Catholic Church out of it, shall we?

The Catholic Church is not the legislator, but an opposing lobbyist. When you lobby for a cause, you target the legislator and not opposing lobbyists because it is the legislator and not opposing lobbyists who can give you what you want.

Trying to bring opposing lobbyists round to your cause achieves nothing, and wastes energy and resources. You also have to target the general public - more specifically, electors - because this is one of the most effective ways of convincing legislators.

Legislators are hugely sensitive to the views of electors. The moment they begin to sit up and listen with anything more than bored toleration of the views of the pro-divorce-legislation lobby is the moment their surveys of public opinion begin to tell them that the majority of electors have no objection to divorce legislation.

The Catholic Church, a seasoned and intelligent lobbyist, knows this. Throughout this long and tiresome debate it has not taken its eyes off the right ball for a minute. It has focussed its thunderous rejections of divorce on our legislators (and please do remember that this means parliament and not the government) and electors.

It has ignored those who argue for divorce legislation. When it does address their arguments - as it has done with the ‘divorce report’ published by The Today Public Policy Institute, its target is not The Today Public Policy Institute, nor even the lead author of the report and chief spokesman Martin Scicluna.

No, the Catholic Church’s real target is electors, and when addressing them, it does not use only theological arguments about the indissolubility of marriage. It uses secular arguments about how divorce legislation affects the perception of marriage as a lifelong commitment and how it brings about an increase in marital breakdown.

Martin Scicluna a few days ago made the mistake of countering the anti-divorce arguments of the Catholic Church as expressed in a document published in response to his own. He is wrong to become entangled with the Catholic Church in bickering, however polite - for this is Martin Scicluna, after all - about its dogma. He is not going to persuade the Vatican to change its stance on divorce, and the Archbishop’s Curia cannot take a different stance to that of the Pope. This much should be obvious. The Archbishop’s Curia and the Vatican cannot, unlike members of parliament, be persuaded to change their views by reasoned argumentation and a presentation of the facts. Dogma is dogma.

The Catholic Church’s opposition to divorce is dogmatic and runs the length of its history. It is not going to change. The reams of comments on the Internet by those who would seek to change the Vatican’s mind about divorce from an armchair in a Maltese living-room are wrong-headed.

It is not their views which are wrong-headed, but the idea that they can bring the Catholic Church round to their way of thinking, or that they should even be trying to do this in the first place.

The effectiveness of the lobby for divorce legislation will increase exponentially only when lobbyists stop targeting the Catholic Church and the Archbishop’s Curia and begin targeting parliament instead. Targeting the government is not enough. No government can get through parliament legislation of this nature without solid support from MPs in both political parties.

Even if the Catholic Church threatens members of parliament with excommunication or puts them under the axe of mortal sin if they vote for a divorce bill, still we should not target it. Instead, we should take this behaviour for granted for religious authorities. How else do we expect them to behave when they are trying to protect their interest and rein in members of their faith?

The role of pro-divorce lobbyists in that case would be to carry on targeting members of parliament by reminding them that, when faced with a choice between the wishes of their constituents and their desire to remain in the embrace of their church, they can opt for the latter only by resigning their seat and ignoring their constituents’ wishes or by abstaining, which is just another way of doing the same thing.

The leader of the Opposition has committed himself to lifting the party whip for a vote on divorce when he becomes prime minister and puts a divorce bill before the house. This begs the question as to why he doesn’t do it now, with a private member’s bill.

If a free vote is allowed, many Labour MPs will vote against the Labour government’s divorce bill, and the prime minister will have to rely on votes from the Nationalist Opposition to get the legislation through. The only way this will happen is if the majority of MPs on both sides of the house are convinced that they will suffer more at the hands of their constituents for voting against the bill than they stand to gain by voting for it.

If MPs who vote against a divorce bill believe that they run the risk of being seen by their constituents as Catholic ‘mullahs’, repressive or unable to understand the distinction between church and state, then they are going to do some very serious thinking before casting that vote.

The inability of certain MPs to distinguish between church and state is real, and not perceived. It is demonstrably obvious how they are concerned that a vote for divorce legislation is a sin against the faith they espouse. On the Opposition benches there is even a member of parliament who has given interviews about how she will vote against divorce because she believes it is wrong and because it is against the Catholic faith. This MP left her husband to set up home with somebody else, with whom she still lives. And yet she will vote against divorce because it is a sin and it breaks up families. If one looks for reason, one runs the risk of succumbing to despair.

Curiously - or perhaps not - the leader of the Opposition himself is victim to this mentality despite his protestations of a secular mindset. He will allow his MPs a free vote precisely because he believes that a vote on divorce legislation is a matter of religious conscience. No truly secular thinker would reason that way.

The prime minister appears to be uncertain what to do about the rapidly encroaching tide of pressure for divorce legislation. Commissioning reports and talking about legislation on the rights of cohabitees - which would result in the irony of a government reluctant to introduce divorce instead creating a form of institutionalised bigamy - are delaying tactics that can buy finite amounts of time. Eventually, the bullet will have to be bitten.

If the prime minister fails to take a decision to put a divorce bill before the House in the next four years, then the leader of the Nationalist Party will have to take a decision on how to direct Opposition MPs to vote when the Labour prime minister puts his divorce bill before the House after 2013.

If the Nationalist leader directs his MPs to vote against that bill, even if it is on the basis that the bill has been badly written or ill conceived, it will be viewed by electors as a vote against divorce and this will have a profoundly negative effect on the party. I would go so far as to say that the effect would be catastrophic.

Refusing to put divorce legislation before the House is perceived by electors as fence-sitting. It allows them to think that the government is not necessarily against divorce but is afraid of introducing it. Actually voting against divorce is something else.

If the Nationalist leader directs his Opposition MPs to vote for the Labour prime minister’s bill, then electors will ask why he did not introduce divorce legislation himself when in government a couple of years earlier, given that the Nationalist Party in government has far more experience in writing legislation and is presumably better at it than the Labour Party is.

If the Nationalist Opposition leader withdraws the party whip and allows his MPs a free vote, he will have fallen into the same trap as the current Opposition leader has done: treating a vote on divorce legislation as a matter of religious conscience and not of accountability to constituents.

If MPs argue that they will vote against a divorce bill because they have canvassed their constituents and discovered that they do not want divorce, then that is a valid argument and one that I will defend. MPs represent their constituents, and if an MP discovers that the majority of his constituents are against divorce legislation, then he would be correct in voting according to their wishes.

What is not correct, on the other hand, is for an MP to vote according to the diktat of his religion without first consulting constituents. If he discovers that his constituents wish him to vote for a divorce bill, but he believes that he cannot do so without compromising his religious faith, then the only way out for him is to resign his seat and make way for somebody who will vote in accordance with constituents’ wishes.

MPs, as I have had occasion to write before, do not represent themselves and their wishes. They are merely conduits for the wishes and demands of their constituents. That is why parliament is called the House of Representatives.

And that is why the divorce lobby must address those representatives, and not the Archbishop or his representatives.

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