This week I had a frank discussion with one of our most experienced politicians. After discussing work-related problems, we ended up, as always happens nowadays, discussing divorce, single parents, co-habitation and the worrying steep and rapid decline of our moral values.

At least such a discussion helped me to understand that the situation does exercise the hearts and minds of our MPs. It seems that their concern is that, whatever they do or don’t do, some people are going to be hurt and this is what is holding up any move forward.  

In English we say that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. That applies to every sphere of life for, in truth, everything is relative. Humans rarely choose in absolute terms. We don’t have an internal value meter that tells us how much things or people are worth. Rather we focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another. We judge a government in relation to what previous administrations had done; we judge a party leader in relation to what his predecessor/s stood for. We cannot help it for we are wired that way. 

It is therefore no surprise that a politician, any politician, has to calculate whether or not his decision is likely to increase his share of the vote. This is why I wrote in last week’s article that a nation needs to have politicians to guide it in its choices, representatives with an ideological heart and soul, who believe in principles rooted in timeless truths and are unafraid to defend them, even at the risk of losing re-election. I don’t expect those who invest in political parties to agree with me.

What is certainly an indisputable fact is that the longer we wait before action is taken, the more difficult it will be to find a solution to the problem. This applies to politics in the same way that it applies to medicine, where the longer one waits to intervene, the more widespread the disease will become and therefore the more difficult to treat.

Inaction will encourage the volume to be turned up and give more impetus to the belief that the authorities are on the run. After all, the divorce debate is being fuelled by a limited number of columnists and contributors together with those in authority whose own lives have hit the breakers. Hence the dangers to parties when they do not screen to what extent their members share the official principles. It would be interesting if readers of this paper were to write in and give their thoughts on the subject.  

The loss of those values that gave society a clear benchmark by which to judge each and every action worries me. This I have publicly confessed and often written about in the full knowledge that the modern liberal life styled progressive movement will rubbish it. If they fly their flag of many colours, I see no reason why I shouldn’t fly one with the colours that have a long and hallowed tradition behind them of service to humanity.

Al Roth, a Harvard economist stated: “In theory, there is no

difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is a great deal of difference.”

My strong and passionate beliefs are not the result of imbibing modern theory but the fruit of my daily experience witnessing the hardships that divorce, co-habitation and single parenthood inflict on the children and the adults involved. What I hear in my surgery convinces me that what is now referred to as “life-choices” is no answer; not when those choices are made in complete ignorance of the future miseries they will bring to individuals as well as society in general. And it is the government’s business to regulate society in the best way possible. Allowing a free for all is no regulation.

I have been a practising family doctor for 43 years, the last 20 years or so dedicated to a large degree to obstetrics and gynaecology. But I am still summoned by previous patients whose family doctor I had been for many years.

During these years I witnessed the decline of the size of the family. In my early years, a family had on average four to five children. Irrespective of cost, which is important of course, the growing trend was to look askance at such families and indeed something to make fun of. I clearly remember men with more than three children being called ‘hanzir’ and ridiculed. Did the clever dicks who started that trend envisage that the day was not far off when Europe would run so woefully short of manpower that it would have to allow huge flows of immigrants into the continent simply to supply the missing manpower and the taxation needed to retain benefit systems?

Concomitantly, Malta entered the industrial age and hugged tourism. Women were encouraged to go out and work because this is what smart people did and because consumerism demanded an unlimited supply of spending power. There were couples of course who did need to go out to work but I don’t believe this constituted the majority.

This resulted in married couples seeing less and less of each other and shifting the raising of their children on to grandparents. After returning from work the wife (and ideally her husband) had to cope with all the household chores. The work-related stress started taking its toll and I experienced an ever-increasing number of female patients requiring medical assistance. I am sure other medical practitioners were experiencing this phenomenon.  

The trend changed again. Gradually the word ‘partner’ started becoming fashionable. It is now as beautifully desirable as the penthouses the smart set chases. Co-habitation started slowly creeping in, and today we have reached the stage where one third or more of marriages officially end up on the rocks. Infidelity has become something to boast about and being a single parent is no longer a thing to be ashamed of.  

Time and time again women who chose to stay at home to be close to their children and their family have expressed their anger at the way they and their husbands have to somehow find the tax money which goes to support this burgeoning trend. I have seen co-habiting partners part for the flimsiest of reasons with little care or responsibility for the children they bore, only for the mother to seek social assistance while the man walks away from all his obligations to plough a new field. Trends – liberal, progressive or otherwise – are no more than fashions to be discarded with impunity. A society based on trends has no future.

Now, when things have reached disquieting proportions, we seem belatedly to start realising that something needs to be done. The fear of taking decisions from the start, out of concern about a possible loss of votes, has allowed the situation to reach such proportions that finding solutions now has become even more politically

hazardous.

Yes, today we talk of divorce, co-habitation, single parents and same-sex marriages as an acceptable way of life, because we walk with the times and because Western culture accepts them. Advocates of this “progressive” society must be deliberately ignoring the terrible outcomes of such theories. There were states in the US where the divorce rate mushroomed to such an extent that panic gripped their administrations as they saw the social cost of the breakdown of the family. Seeking to lock the stable door after the horse has bolted is a

pretty futile exercise.

Yes, I believe that with each day that passes, family breakdowns are becoming more acute and the longer we let things drift, the more difficult it will become to save and sustain the family. We need to act now, not by blessing and facilitating such breakdowns but by first studying the causes and their effects on society, and by proposing immediate alternatives that strengthen and reward the family.

It is time for those whose duty it is to guide and regulate society to wake up to the realities and

suggest solutions to the above and to other problems that surface daily as a result of our decaying moral fibre.

Happy holidays to all my readers; I’ll be back in September.