“Like everyone else, I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching and I’ve been noticing the realities around me. I see people my age, and younger, whose marriages have failed, sometimes through no fault of their own. And I wonder: Why shouldn’t we give them the right to start a family afresh?” Nationalist MP Karl Gouder
Karl Gouder is not the first to use this argument, but only the latest one to do so. Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando has used it repeatedly. The new pro-divorce organisation seeks to build its entire campaign on it. And so the mantra is rapidly being taken up by the crowd, by which I mean the crowd on the Internet.
Yet it is an entirely nonsensical, illogical argument. The right (and ability) to marry and the right (and ability) to form a family are entirely separate and distinct. They have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Neither one is dependent on the other or grows out of it.
It is biologically possible and legally permissible to marry and not have children. It is biologically possible and legally permissible to have children without being married, or when you are married to somebody other than the one you are busy having children with. That much should be obvious. Why, then, is the divorce movement confusing the two issues, the two rights, and weakening its own campaign by saying that divorce will allow people to form a family?
Divorce will not allow people to form a family. It will allow people who have formed families already to marry each other, and then only if they want to. We have to assume that many of them won’t want to, because − let’s face it − if having children outside wedlock, or rather in wedlock to somebody else, really bothered them that much then they wouldn’t have done it in the first place.
Lots of people don’t, precisely because it would bother them. When their marriages break down and they find somebody else to live with, they don’t feel any great urge to spawn afresh, largely out of respect and love for the children they have had already, who would feel betrayed twice over. And no, children – even grown-up children who have made their own way in the world already – are not excited or pleased about the arrival of half-siblings. They only pretend to be, to keep the fragile peace. I really think the divorce movement has got hold of the wrong end of the stick, as exemplified in this non sequitur of an argument up above. The people who will vote, in a referendum, for divorce legislation are not just those who are living in sin with 1.5 children and a marriage to somebody else. You’re not going to win a referendum on the strength of those votes alone.
The bulk of the Yes vote will be made up of people who think exactly as I do. They hate all the scrabbling around, the mixing and matching, the tahwid, the children of this one living with the children of that one. They disapprove of the sexual and emotional incontinence that leads grown men and women to shatter their children’s lives and security and deprive them of the one thing they want and need most of all: one fixed home with two fixed parents.
They consider ridiculous the belief that you can start again at 50 as though you were 25, because they understand that life is a straight line from birth to death, and not a circle or a continuum. They know that what you miss out on at 20 you can’t experience at 40, and that there are no second chances or fresh starts, no matter how much we would like to think so, but only chapter after chapter in the same book, with just one beginning and just one end.
But yet they understand that people are free to make their own messes, create their own problems and break up their marriages, and if they want to remarry then the law shouldn’t stop them because they’re over 18. A legal system that allows you to enter into a lifelong contract of marriage at 16 with your parents’ permission and at 18 with no permission at all, when you’re far too young and immature to know what in heaven’s name you’re doing − but then doesn’t allow you to dissolve that contract at 30, 40, 50 or 60 when you know exactly what you want, is more than a little bit odd. Of course it is odd; that’s why we’re on our own out here, out on a limb.
The majority of people who are in favour of divorce are not like Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando or that couple called Penelope and Gordon on Bondiplus last Monday. They are still living with their spouses and intend to stay that way, but they understand that other people might not want the same thing. They believe that those people have every right to call it a day in Malta once Malta accords them the right to call it a day in another jurisdiction.
Those who think as I do are not pro-divorce. I would say that most of us − myself, certainly − cannot stand tahwid and regard it with suspicion and irritation. But we are pro-divorce legislation. And we are pro-secularisation. And above all, we know that we have no right to interfere with or control the way grown men and women choose to live unless it is criminal, in which case it is up to the police and certainly not up to us.
The divorce movement should stop all this nonsense about wanting to divorce so that you can remarry, and claiming that people are in favour of divorce because they are in favour of marriage. The primary aim of divorce is not to aid remarriage but to cut all ties with an existing spouse. Everywhere in the world, the vast majority of people who divorce do so long before they have another relationship, still less an interest in marrying again.
Indeed, recent divorcees who have just gone through the trauma of one marriage ending are likely to regard with horror the prospect of remarriage. Yes, the divorce movement should have the courage of its convictions and stop pleading special case status or attempting to justify its stance. To seek to justify what you claim is a right is an admission of weakness at the outset. It reminds me of those women – gosh, how mad they make me – who demand promotion because women are as good as men and we have evidence of this. Really? You don’t say.
Above all, the divorce movement should recognise the fact that it is perfectly possible to view divorce and what I believe are called ‘blended families’ with utmost distaste and still be in favour of divorce legislation and happily friendly with any number of people who are divorced, separated, cohabiting and the rest. I am one of them, and like me there are silent thousands. We are distinct from the religious brigade because our distaste for marital chaos has nothing to do with religious instruction and everything to do with a perceived lack of consideration for the children involved. Where there are no children we see both marriage and divorce as a total irrelevance. But I have always wondered at parents who are prepared to die for their children, yet somehow can’t find it in themselves to do something far less taxing and final, which is to keep a secure home over those children’s heads, no matter how dull and tiresome it might be some days, or how very much more attractive the bright lights outdoors might seem. Most marriages don’t break up because of violence or ill-treatment or abuse or financial trouble. They break up because of our innate inability to deal with the tedium of quotidian life or the manifold and manifest irritations of living with another person’s quirks for decades.
Yes, it’s possible to disapprove of divorce but approve of divorce legislation. That is exactly my stance; it is the stance of many and would be the stance of even more, if they were to allow themselves to see that the two are quite separate and distinct. Both the pro- and the anti-divorce groups would do well to understand this. And the Nationalist Party needs to understand it most of all. The values of that political party are embodied in the apparent tautology, which is not a tautology at all. Respect for the importance of the integrity of the family leads to a disapproval of divorce, but respect for the freedom, integrity and dignity of the individual – another core Nationalist Party value – can only lead to a decision in favour of divorce legislation.
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