The Nationalist Party, as distinct from the government, the day before yesterday began to debate divorce – and doesn’t it sound ridiculous reading that in the year 2010? – in the light of Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s private member’s bill.

We learned from a newspaper report yesterday that three prominent players in the party, who also happen to be Cabinet ministers, refuse to countenance the very idea of divorce legislation and opposed it most forcefully during Friday’s meeting. They are Tonio Fenech, Tonio Borg and Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, so no surprises there.

Borg agreed that a referendum should be held, but I imagine the reason is that he has a very good idea that the Yes vote will lose the day once the divisive campaigning kicks in and the parish priests of Malta bring out their billboards and their holy water. And if a referendum is lost, then bye-bye divorce for another generation at least, so Borg will not live to see it. The party leader, who also happens to be prime minister, made clear his views against divorce, but was reported to have been less dogmatic than his Cabinet colleagues.

What we are never told in reports of politicians X, Y and Z objecting to divorce is the precise nature of those objections. Listing them, and giving them a name and a shape, is not just useful but crucial if those objections are to be taken seriously. I expect the unthinking hysterics who comment beneath news reports on the Internet to say that they are against divorce without giving the reasons why, but I expect more from the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of the Interior, and the Finance Minister. Their thinking skills and powers of argumentation are not in doubt, to a man – most especially the Prime Minister – and yet, when asked the simple question ‘Why? Why are you against divorce?’ we get the equivalent of the childish ‘Because I am’, or the Prime Minister’s marginally more sophisticated reply that we should protect Maltese ‘tezori’.

I cannot understand why they believe they can get away with this. In their position, they are expected to enumerate their objections, give reasons for their thinking, and explain how and why they have reached their conclusion that Malta should remain the only country in the world – bar one – without divorce legislation. They are duty bound to explain how and why they think they are able to reinvent the wheel on marriage and its dissolution. They haven’t done so, I suspect, because they are unable to do so. To make their situation still more uncomfortable, they are rational enough to know that their position is both irrational and untenable, a discomfort that the Internet hysterics, secure in their mental confusion, do not have to countenance.

Their reaction against divorce is straight from the gut, and not from the mind. It is not the product of thought, but of feelings and of the lessons learned in childhood doctrine classes which failed to distinguish between reason and emotion. It is very odd indeed to see four such men, three of them skilled lawyers and the other an accountant – all of them very senior politicians and Cabinet ministers – reverting in this sole character-destabilising instance to the teenage years before they had developed the wonders of independent thought.

They would not dream of behaving like this, vetoing something without giving the electorate solid and well-reasoned arguments against it, backed by facts and numbers, with any other political issue. When Lawrence Gonzi wants to sell us something, he takes to the hustings armed for combat and conviction with all the facts and figures, a miracle of preparation and with a memory like a filing cabinet. Yet here he is now, trying to sell us the idea that Malta doesn’t need divorce legislation, and he’s hopeless, floundering and changing the subject.

The fearsome logic and clear thinking for which he is known in discussion and debate, and when fielding questions, desert him completely when he is asked – as he should be asked, because he is the prime minister – why he doesn’t want Malta to have divorce legislation. This is because you cannot apply clear thinking and logic to the issue and conclude that Malta should not have divorce. The Prime Minister’s rational mind is at odds on this one with his irrational heart, and it is his irrational heart – unusually – which wins out. That’s how strong the pull of childhood indoctrination is.

Similarly, it is inconceivable that Tonio Borg, Tonio Fenech and Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, when asked about a political matter, should get away without explaining their reasons. But like the Prime Minister, when asked to justify their position on divorce, they find they are unable to do so and fully expect the public to demand no explanation of them. Their inability to explain their position is the strongest indication yet, and they probably know it, that this position is based not on reason but on theology, which has no place in the affairs of state.

It is not those who are for divorce legislation who have to present a strong suit in the present when there are but two countries in the world without it. It is those who oppose divorce legislation who have to make their case convincingly. They are the ones who are at odds with the world. So far, they have failed to do so, and it is unlikely that they ever will. To present a strong suit against divorce legislation is well nigh impossible, and that is why the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of the Interior, and the Finance Minister are, on this matter, speaking like children. The electorate deserves better.

Bungling Anglu

Let’s hope that the Attorney-General’s decision to appeal against the magistrate’s ruling in the ‘Pierre Bartolo forced me to vote PN’ case was his way of blowing the matter out of the water for good, rather than caving in to pressure from Anglu Farrugia, who will be deputy prime minister (and minister for justice, if he wins the battle with Consuelo Herrera’s brother) in three years’ time.

Even if the Attorney-General is motivated by the former sentiment and not the craven latter, he shows scant regard for the spirit of justice in his decision to force Pierre Bartolo – a victim of Anglu Farrugia’s apparent belief that it is quite all right to use police action for political vengeance – through the mill of political persecution once more.

If there is any political persecution and corrupt thinking in this story at all, it is Anglu Farrugia who is doing it, aided and abetted by his friends in the police force and now, it seems, also the Attorney-General’s office.

If Anglu Farrugia, the police and the Attorney-General have started as they mean to go on (and let’s be frank, Anglu Farrugia started a long time ago in the 1980s, and so did his friends in the police) then we are now standing on the thin end of the wedge. It can only get much worse when the unprincipled and peasant-minded Farrugia is running the country. Would we ever have thought we’d see the day?

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