The unfortunate sight of Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando conducting himself on the matter of the divorce question like a starving terrier with a bone has been completely off-putting, not that I could be put off any further at this late stage. Equally, watching Joseph Muscat seize this opportunity and cling to it as a way of distracting attention from his failure to speak up about Libya has been....well, nothing more or less than I expected. The man cannot formulate a view about Libya, still less voice it, and not because the lingering suspicion might turn out to be true that Muammar Gaddafi bankrolled the Malta Labour Party. It is because Muscat is fundamentally a small man with a small mind, incapable of seeing the bigger picture – as evidenced by his five years of hindsight about EU membership, and his talk about tourism marketing campaigns as his sole reaction to the clamour for human rights and freedom in North Africa.

I disagree utterly with the Prime Minister on the matter of divorce, but he is right in what he says about the referendum question which Jeffrey and Joseph, with a little help from their friends Jesmond and Evarist, have shoved down our throats. The question is: “Do you agree with having the option of having divorce for married couples who have been separated for four years when there is no reasonable hope for reconciliation and when adequate maintenance is guaranteed and the children are cared for.”

It is wrong-headed and misleading, and could only have been drafted by a dentist, an architect, a Super One hack-turned-politician and a lecturer in communications who never even learned how to drive a car. This is not to cast aspersions on those professions in general, but there is a reason why the most vociferous opposition to this idiotic question has come from lawyers and from people who cannot bear fudging and lack of precision in meaning and clarity in language, like me.

Unfortunately, the Prime Minister was burdened with the accusation that he objected to this question because – or so Malta Today and Pullicino Orlando claimed – it is more likely to yield a Yes vote. Pullicino Orlando and Muscat are themselves accused of favouring the question for that same reason. That seems likely to me, because I hardly think either of them is bothered about the whys and wherefores of divorce, but only about getting it through.

Nobody with a clear mind could possibly come up with a question like that or fail to see the major holes in it. The problem clear-minded people have now been dumped with, thanks to the three Js, the one E and the mindless rank and file of the Labour parliamentary group, is whether we want to vote Yes (or No) to such a damn-fool question, or just stay away from the referendum altogether. I’m tempted not to vote, because I consider the question insulting, and it is not what I believe at all. What I believe is that, if people are considered competent to take a decision on marriage, then it follows they are competent to take a decision on divorce. If two people decide they want to divorce each other, then you can’t tell them ‘No, ta, you have to wait for four years’. When people decide they want to get married, we don’t tell them they have to wait for four years to see whether they’re sure about it. They only have to wait as long as the marriage banns are out, which is just a few weeks.

Some of the pro-divorce contingent might regard voting on this half-baked question as doing the necessary to get divorce legislation through, at least some form of divorce legislation. Others might conclude that voting on the question would be a betrayal of their real opinion, which is best served by answering the far more sensible question: ‘Do you agree that Malta should have divorce legislation?’

This question is distinct and different from: ‘Do you agree with divorce?’ Referendums are not there to collect personal value judgements, but agreement or disagreement with proposed legislation or policy. It is perfectly possible to frown on divorce, but at the same time see that legislation should be available for those who don’t feel the same way.

That the question to be forced on us has not been composed by a forensic mind is obvious at the outset, with the specification that this divorce they have in mind is going to be available to “married couples”. Really – as opposed to single people, one assumes. You cannot be divorced unless you are married and you are not a couple if you have been separated for four years. This is the kind of messy thinking and clumsy writing that drives me up the wall. Am I going to vote for it? I have until 28 May to decide whether I want to compromise my self-respect by doing so. Resisting the temptation of using my ballot-pencil to correct the butchery of common sense and clarity, thereby rendering my vote invalid, will be tough.

Those who opposed the question focussed on the fact that nobody can guarantee maintenance to anyone else, not even in marriage, let alone in divorce. But because all our politicians, down to the last man, appear to see divorce as something that men ‘do’ to women, not one of them challenged the question on a far more serious matter: who exactly is going to pay maintenance to whom?

The question appears to have been written with drop-jawed fools in mind. What maintenance are we talking about – maintenance for the children, or maintenance for the parent who looks after them? And if so, which parent and in what circumstances? If there are no children to be maintained, is the stay-at-home spouse to be kept in the manner to which she or he has been accustomed? I don’t know whether to think this a cynical ploy which trades on the typical Maltese assumption that the men who run off will be forced to maintain their abandoned wives, or whether Jeffrey, Jesmond, Joseph and Evarist are so typically Mediterranean and closed-minded that this is how they think themselves. With equality written into our marriage laws, no man is going to be forced after divorce to maintain an ex-wife who is perfectly capable of working, even if he has maintained her until that point. But then again, the wife who runs off – and there are several – leaving her husband to raise the children will be obliged to maintain him, and them.

I heard nothing of this in the chaos of argument about the referendum question. Nor did I hear any politician ask Jeffrey and Joseph sarcastically why they didn’t include in the question guarantees on who gets to keep living in the family home. This is one of the biggest issues, if not actually the biggest, with divorce. It is the reason so many men in Britain, and women in the United States, end up homeless and living on the streets: they lose their home when they divorce and cannot afford to buy or rent another.

There is another point which I heard no politician bring up, and which is not clear in the question. Is the four-year separation requirement going to be mandatory even in cases where divorce is consensual? If so, then it is as fascistic as the current situation of not allowing them to divorce at all. The thinking which underpins it is exactly the same: you were both old enough to know whether you wanted to marry, but we don’t think you’re old enough to know whether you want to divorce. So we’re going to force you into a four-year cooling-off period.

In the divorce legislation of other states, mandatory periods of separation come into play only when the divorce is not consensual. One of the parties can refuse to sign the divorce papers throughout that period – in Britain it is two years, I believe – but after that the divorce just goes through automatically.

Now that the matter of the divorce referendum question has been settled to Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s satisfaction and that of the Labour leader, perhaps we can turn our minds to far more important matters which are about to consume us, even as we fiddle about with various forms of displacement activity.