A number of Nationalist MPs who are lawyers have been reported as saying that they are against the introduction of legislation allowing divorce. One of the reasons given, and which stood out above the rest, was the “Christian principles” of some of these MPs. Now these MPs, as lawyers, often accept to defend people who have committed criminal acts; heinous crimes, such as attacking and killing elderly people in their homes, or acting as defence counsel to drug barons who ruin the lives of so many young people, some of whom end up losing their life!

Surely, such crimes offend “Christian principles”. But these MPs, as is expected of them in their profession – do not take into consideration their “Christian principles” when they accept to defend such criminals. They put their duty to defend all those who seek their legal assistance before their personal “Christian values or principles”. And so it should be.

How can these same MPs then declare that they will be voting against any legislation allowing the dissolution of a marriage that has long ceased to exist, thus giving thousands of fellow Maltese who are separated the right to remarry? Are such separated people considered worse than hardened criminals by these MPs?

Don’t these same MPs realise that just as they considered it their duty, as lawyers, to defend criminals, so it is their duty as MPs, to see to the needs of people – their own constituents with whose votes they may have been elected to Parliament – who have gone through, and perhaps are still going through, the trauma of a broken marriage?

Another reason given by some of these lawyers was that “divorce is against the common good”. Are criminal acts intended to promote the “common good”? There again, these lawyers do not consider the common good when practising their profession at the Law Courts. Why then do they bring up this argument when they are expected to do their duty as Members of Parliament where they are elected not to represent their own personal “religious values”, but to represent and work for the needs of all their constituents. And when divorce is purely a civil law that concerns those who need it, and who want to make use of it to rebuild their shattered lives!

What hypocrisy!

Eddy Privitera

MOSTA