The divorce campaign, with its attendant stupidities, has become so tedious that the referendum will have the effect of lancing a wound – at least for as long as it takes both sides of this inane and ultimately pointless war to re-gird their loins and go back into battle.

For make no mistake, a No vote will wipe divorce legislation off parliament’s agenda and that of the political parties, but it will not do anything to eradicate the pressing demand for that legislation. It will instead make that demand more urgent. It will heighten resentment towards, and disengagement from, the political parties, which have sold the nation short by abdicating their legislative responsibilities and passing the buck back to the electorate.

The latest ridiculous statement in this ongoing circus is an update on the one which says that divorce harms children. I would have found the crass idiocy of this to be unbelievable had I not lived in Malta for the last four decades. Here, rational thought is a strange creature best not let out of its cage, lest it wreak havoc in a nation of minds groomed in illogical reasoning throughout a childhood of mandatory parish doctrine classes and outdated schooling.

It is not divorce which harms children, as the Children’s Commissioner declared when she met leaders of the anti-divorce campaign, last Monday. Commonsense, a useful tool which has gone spectacularly AWOL during this campaign – chasing after its girlfriend Rational Thought, no doubt – tells us that it is not divorce which harms children but the estrangement of their parents. Whether this estrangement occurs through divorce or separation, when those parents are married, or the end of cohabitation when they are not, is irrelevant. The hurt is caused by the fracturing of the household and the departure of one parent to live elsewhere – or worse, the selling of the family home where the children were raised and its replacement with two alien dwellings neither of which ever really becomes home.

So why do research reports and analytical studies speak of divorce and not marital breakdown when discussing the effects on children? Simple: none of the reports quoted so nauseatingly by Maltese campaigners were actually written or researched in Malta. And so they speak of divorce, rather than ‘separation’, because everywhere in the world bar here (and the Philippines), the result of marital breakdown is divorce and not a permanent limbo called ‘separation’.

Commonsense should also tell these campaigners that, were they to get their collective acts together and research the situation in Malta of children who come from what used to be called broken homes, there will be no difference whatsoever between these children of separated parents and the children of divorced parents elsewhere. All children know is that their parents are no longer together.

Because they are not old enough to have been corrupted by the silliness that makes older people so irrational, children make no distinction between separation and divorce. To them, it is all the same because the effects, as far as they are concerned, are identical. They are not interested in the finer aspects of the law by which divorce allows Mummy to marry Tony. They are not concerned beyond the fact that they and Mummy are living with Tony, not Daddy, and that when they go to Daddy’s flat at the weekend, they may well be confronted by some fresh hell of embarrassment and destabilising foolishness. A hair transplant, perhaps, or a waxed chest – and then it’s only a matter of time before these drops from the fountain of youth are not enough and he produces, in his 40s or much later, one of those infants the pro-divorce campaign so charmingly refers to as ‘bgħula’, announcing its imminent arrival on Facebook, where he now has 987 friends.

If all this sounds familiar, then that’s because it is. Malta does not have divorce but it has all the things which culminate in divorce, and it is those things which children find so upsetting. The Children’s Commissioner, Helen D’Amato, was foolish in the extreme to quote studies and statistics (none of them Maltese) as proof that divorce is harmful to children because children need stability – ergo Malta should not have divorce legislation.

Is the absence of divorce legislation going to prevent marital breakdown? No – the proof of that is all around us. Is it going to stop Mummy living with Tony and Daddy waxing his chest and fathering a half-sibling with a half-stranger? No. Is it going to bring Mummy and Daddy back together again at some point in the mythical future? No. Is the introduction of divorce legislation going to change the reality of life for children of broken marriages? No.

Helen D’Amato, like the vast majority of those who are against the introduction of divorce legislation, just doesn’t get it. I believe she is a school-teacher by training. Does she honestly think that there is any difference in the circumstances of a child whose parents have split up without divorcing and a child whose parents have divorced? Does she truly believe that the thousands of Maltese children whose parents live apart would suffer any greater disruption if those parents were to divorce? If so, then she had better list her reasons, because I can’t see any.