Somebody remarked to me earlier that the ‘No’ and ‘Yes’ camps in this referendum have brought together some pretty odd bedfellows. My response was that there is no ‘Yes’ camp. There is only a ‘No’ camp, and this regardless of the numbers involved.

The people who think that the Maltese should remain the only 400,000 people in the world without divorce legislation are not a ‘camp’. We hold the normal, universally accepted, standard view. You cannot even call it a view or opinion, because it is a fact. States need divorce legislation.

The only people with an opinion, rather than an acceptance of a state of affairs, are the naysayers. Theirs is an opinion because it is at odds with the fact that states need divorce legislation. They are like the people who believe that Elvis is still alive somewhere in Graceland, or that there is human life on Mars.

You can no more call those who plan to vote ‘Yes’ ‘a camp’ than you can describe as a ‘camp’ or special interest group those who accept mandatory education for children as the norm. A ‘camp’ would be those who believe, contrary to the rest of the world, that there should be no schooling for children.

And so it is with those who believe that these islands should carry on without divorce legislation. They are the odd-balls, the strange fish, and the ‘camp’. Their views are abnormal, unacceptable and unaccepted in a non-isolationist context, weirder than the Rosicrucians.

It is only the peculiar abnormality of Malta that makes us think of the abnormal as normal. The referendum, and all this talk and campaigning, have allowed us to believe that divorce legislation is an option. It isn’t. It is a must. We shouldn’t be discussing whether or not to have divorce legislation but what form that divorce legislation should take.

The ‘No’ camp has struggled to justify the unjustifiable, confusing emotional with legal reasoning and making no sense at all. Each of its arguments can and has been torn to shreds, because none are built on reason, but the ‘No’ camp doesn’t think this matters because its plea is primarily to the emotions. Emotions make for very poor laws and even poorer decisions.

And all the arguments the ‘No’ people use against divorce can be used equally against marriage and having children. You should no more prevent people from divorcing because they might not be able to afford it than you should prevent people from marrying and having children because they might not be able to afford that.

And after weeks and months of telling us that they are adamantly against divorce because it is wrong and intrinsically bad, the spokesman of the ‘Marriage Without Divorce’ movement told reporters yesterday that he is not against divorce as such, but only against the proposed bill and the referendum question. So why didn’t he say so before?

Those reporters had to prise it out of him, repeatedly telephoning him with questions, until finally he came out with it. No, Arthur Galea Salomone is not against divorce in general - and this after we have been given a very different impression during the campaign. If the divorce is consensual, then he’s fine with it (I should ruddy well hope so, too – given that it would be none of his business or anybody else’s).

But then where does that leave all of his movement’s impassioned pleas about the plight of the children involved? What are all those billboards about? So if both parents agree to divorce, rather than one divorcing the other, then suddenly the children are not an issue. The lack of logic defies belief.

The bottom line to all this is that the private life of other adults is not Arthur Galea Salomone’s or Andre Camilleri’s business. This is a basic principle of democracy, which demands that we do not interfere or seek to control even where we do not agree. That is why adultery and sodomy were decriminalised. That is why promises to marry have long since ceased to be enforceable by law. That is why people are not made by the police to live in the same home as their spouse when they want to leave. That is why only 400,000 people in the world (discounting those crackpots in the Philippines) don’t have divorce legislation.

Just as I have absolutely no desire to interfere in whether Arthur Galea Salomone’s and Andre Camilleri’s wives divorce them and marry somebody else - I think it important to put it that way round because of their apparent belief that wives are there to be divorced by randy and irresponsible men – so they should have no desire to interfere in what I and others do. And yet they even want to control the decisions of generations still to be born. I just cannot understand why this group of people have such an obsessive and driven need to control the lives of others.

Dr Galea Salomone is right when he says that maintenance cannot be guaranteed after divorce. But he is utterly wrong to use this as an argument against divorce legislation. As with all the arguments against divorce, this one can be used to argue against marriage. A woman – for yet again, in the ‘No’ camp’s world it is always men who fail to earn money for their families or who run off and leave the other parent to cope alone – has no guarantee that she and any children she might have will be maintained during marriage, that she will not have (or want) to work to pay some of the bills or even most of them.

But do I hear Dr Galea Salomone and Dr Camilleri say that we should not allow people to marry because husbands might refuse to work and leave their wives dependent on social assistance, or because husbands can spend the food money on cigarettes and scratch cards, and oblige their wives to take low-paid and arduous work to pay the supermarket bill? No, I do not.

Do I hear them say that people cannot be trusted to behave responsibly and have only as many children as they can afford, and so the state should have a say in the number of children we are allowed to have, based on how much money we earn and how many loans we still have to pay off? No, I do not.

Dr Galea Salomone and Dr Camilleri probably – I say probably because going on what has been said in public I have doubts – would see this as an unacceptable degree of control. They might even laugh in disbelief at the suggestion. Well, in that case they then know why, when they say people shouldn’t be allowed to divorce, others laugh in disbelief at them.