My antennae tell me that the pro-divorce lobby is about to take one almighty knock as anti-divorce sentiment begins to crystallise. So far, it has all been in a state of flux, with opinion shifting one way or the other and rather a lot of people not quite sure what they thought. I’m not looking at any polls or statistics here, but just picking up the clues and going on gut instinct. So I might be wildly off the mark, but I don’t think I am.
For many years, the divorce lobby was seen as part of the lunatic fringe because of the sort of odd people who fronted it and were its poster boys – no names mentioned here, but it really wasn’t helpful to have Emy Bezzina shout about it for aeons. Then, when the divorce lobby acquired a more respectable image and reputable people began to advance seriously the idea of divorce, it gained ground, helped in no small manner by the growing number of people whose marriages had failed. But the crucial thing is that liberals who were previously too embarrassed to be associated with Dr Bezzina began to dominate media which were hungry for such stuff.
There is no doubt at all that the media have set the agenda and that’s not a bad thing, because one of the roles of the press and broadcasting is to get people to think about things. Yet when that happens, people can feel harried into forming an opinion because they feel they should have one and that they are inadequate if they don’t. They can also feel bullied into adopting the ‘fashionable’ opinion: they think they should say, when asked, that they are in favour of divorce because that’s what ‘everyone’ seems to be saying except for some priests and right-wing politicians. And then they become resentful about it and are more likely to shift and change in the privacy of their own mind.
Over the last couple of years, the pro-divorce lobby has been in the ascendant, while, in a curious reversal of the earlier scenario, the anti-divorce lobby had began to acquire that undesirable lunatic fringe status, with much talk of hellfire, of God not wanting divorce, and suggestions that the whole world might be wrong but we are right. Now it’s about to change again, as the birth of a new anti-divorce group led by people who command respect rescues it from that fate, while Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, unfortunately but inevitably, has manoeuvred himself into the position of poster-boy for divorce.
This is far from ideal and he undermines severely his own cause, although his personality being what it is, he is unable to see it and will hotly contest the suggestion that he is doing the pro-divorce lobby no favours at all by turning it into his own personal bandwagon.
Also, the pro-divorce lobby has become too strident and irritating, and I know that I might be considered guilty as charged. When you are dealing with irrefutable rationality and with what you see to be glaringly obvious, it is easy to lose patience with those whose fears you see as wholly irrational. But those fears are real, and ironically it is the pro-divorce movement which has done more to crystallise them over the last few weeks than any amount of shouting about ‘God not wanting divorce’ has done over the last two years.
As soon as I saw the pro-divorce movement’s new logo, I knew exactly the sort of negative effect it would have – the direct opposite to that intended. It shows two couples, one of them with children, and one lone child between the pairs, an arm out in either direction. Because he’s at the centre, he’s the focus of the arrangement. Where we are expected to see a happy kid with mummy’s new family and daddy’s new wife, what we see instead is a poor soul tugged both ways and belonging to neither family, while his younger half-sibling gets to keep, smugly, both his parents together. These are all faceless stick figures, which undermine the movement’s message that it is all about real people and their suffering.
The pro-divorce movement makes the mistake of thinking that because it has common sense and rationality on its side, then it is going to win out with ‘logical’ arguments over the other side, which plays to the emotions. It has not yet learned that in any contest between rationality and the emotions, the emotions invariably win. After all, isn’t this how most marriages break down, when the emotions win over rationality? So it shouldn’t be too hard for the pro-divorce movement to understand.
What this means is that it should think harder about perception. Take the two couples who were interviewed on BondiPlus last Monday. The anti-divorce couple came across as young, good, in love, charming, full of joy and respect for each other, well aware of what commitment means. You warmed to them. But the pro-divorce couple – heaven help us. As an example of people’s distaste for divorce made flesh, they were straight from central casting. They might be very nice people (I don’t know them from Adam), but they came across as a man edging into old age, who had already messed up the business of raising one family, by his own admission, who had fallen for a sexy bimbo type 20 years his junior and thought it was love, producing three children outside wedlock.
When asked whether they would marry if there is divorce legislation, you’d have thought they would answer with an enthusiastic ‘Yes’. But instead she answered with a laconic “Nithajjar” and he said “If she wants me, yes I will get married. Why not?” It was like they were being offered a new pension plan by their bank. It was a disaster, because it illustrated perfectly what I have said for ages: that it is wrong to assume that those who live together, with or without children, necessarily want a marriage certificate or are gagging for one. Well, we have yet to see what lies ahead.
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