(You may want to sing it to the tune of ABBA’s Knowing me, knowing you)

Oh, I see, criticising an opposing political camp and drawing on the lessons from history is now bullying. According to the mad reasoning of the Movement Against Divorce, logically comparing their standpoint of “the common good” to similar, highly-effective Nazi propaganda methods is bullying of the sort they want the police, poor battered, uniformed souls supposedly trying to cope with the pressure of civil war in Libya, to take action against whoever does so.

I wonder what this bunch of holier-than-thou, bible-thumping individuals think of people being threatened with eternal damnation if they vote yes in the divorce referendum next month. If that is not bullying the herd, I don’t know what is. And what about children being directly and sanctimoniously addressed on a problem they can hardly comprehend, except that they see the two people they love most in the world arguing and fighting every day? I guess that is not bullying, but psychological warfare, a bit like Gaddafi’s cluster bombs.

No one in his right mind expected a divorce referendum in Malta to happen in an atmosphere of relative socio-political tranquillity. That would have been like expecting the sharks to refrain from having a real go at the blood-soaked bait dangling from a mid-ocean boat. But that a national movement, aided and abetted by the party in government and the local Church, should feel it is being bullied smacks of downright hypocrisy.

Rather than those who are against divorce, it was people who are for this civil right that were feeling bullied during the traditional ‘Duluri’ processions all over these islands. It was obvious that someone, somewhere – a Maltese Rasputin – had orchestrated the whole event during which the vast majority of officiating priests, rather than speaking about the pains endured by ‘Our Lady of Sorrows’, not so inexplicably chose to treat family and family values with obvious, out-of-context and misleading references to divorce.

As expected, the same old tactic is being used in churches while the Archbishop – not as expected, since he had declared that the Church was not about to embark on a 1960s-style crusade – has been on TV accusing the media of assisting the pro-divorce movement.

So far we’ve had the cardboard slogans, the interfering priests, the bullying priests, the whispering campaigns inside confessionals, convents, chapels and churches, the mobilisation inside schools, institutes, colleges and doctrinal centres, and Church-governing party collusion involving the sharing of so-called experts and organisers. All that remains for a full-bloodied re-enactment of the 1960s is the mortal sin.

For the anti-divorcists to come out claiming “bullying” will sound hollow and obscene to anyone who understands the basics of Maltese society, caught as it is in a time warp that carries within it the foul smell of damp remnants of black-and-white movies and faded sepia photographs. How else can one describe a society that while it has, not so overwhelmingly, voted to join the European Union for its undoubtedly liberal policies and values, hardly bats an eyelid when its own government prefers to delve into puerile political pique and, in the process, denies thousands of young men and women the right to vote in the referendum, despite the fact they will have reached the voting age by 28 May?

One would also have expected the European Union overseers, amongst us and wherever in Brussels they warm their plush seats, to object to this “bullying” tactic. It is something over which I believe our MEPs should have shown more concern and should have brought it up in the European Parliament, where lessons in democracy are said to be dished out on cross-party conveyor belts.

The Maltese print media is doing a wonderful job in its treatment of the divorce issue, with most newspapers not hesitating to express their views (mostly for) on the great need of a divorce law but still allowing – and rightly so – the ‘No’ movement to be heard, even when it makes such ludicrous claims as the one of bullying.

Set against this professional attitude of the print media to the referendum campaign, is the bare-faced partiality of state broadcasting. There is absolutely no fairness in its treatment of the divorce issue, with the MAD standpoints finding better and cleaner exposure compared to the downplay of all that the YES movement represents.

The Broadcasting Authority too, has characteristically chosen to take the “official” line by establishing procedures and taking decisions that swing things more to the ruling party’s position on the issue. It was strange, for example, for the Authority to decide that all broadcasters, private or not, are to ensure impartiality in their programmes and commercials, when during the EU referendum campaign eight years ago that same Authority had insisted that only state broadcasters were bound to ensure impartiality.

The overall strategy is clear: throw as much mud as you can, doesn’t let the issue be discussed openly and frighten the public over the next few weeks into voting to preserve the prohibition of a civil right enjoyed in the rest of Europe. It is a strategy that stinks of the same odour that has surrounded Maltese politics since the introduction of self-government.

Happily, the polls have so far shown that people are learning more about and appreciating better the complex, unfair and cruel reality that allows the Church to decide whose marriage is to be annulled or not (including some quick-fix such processes for the more influential of local society) and for the state to automatically recognise very expensive divorce papers obtained elsewhere in the world, but at the same time denying it to everyone else, even couples who had opted strictly for a civil marriage.

Bully me, bully you......