Two People are a couple, not a family

Malta Independent Sunday, 30 September 2012, 00:00 Last update: about 13 years ago

The Labour Party is trying hard to convince us that it believes all families to be equal. Joseph Muscat said as much during his first mass meeting, where it was apparent that he couldn’t get over the thrill of addressing such a great crowd of people.

Nobody can sensibly quarrel with the equal status of families. Why shouldn’t all families be equal before the law? Of course they should be. The trouble lies with defining what makes a family, and Joseph Muscat has carefully avoided defining it.

He made his cry to the crowd in the context of the promise that the Most Feminist Government in Maltese History will legislate for civil unions between people of the same gender. And that’s what threw me, because I remember him quite clearly as saying not so long ago that he is totally opposed to same-sex marriage (a civil union is a second-class contract) and that he cannot agree with adoption of children by same-sex couples.

I might be totally off the wall in thinking this, but to my mind a family involves children, even if those children have grown up and gone. Two people without children are not a family. They are a couple. They are a couple whether they are a man and a woman, two men, or two women. Putting children into the mix makes them no longer a simple couple, but an actual family, and this regardless of whether the adults in the home are two men, two women or a man and a woman.

Let’s put it this way. A single woman with a child constitutes a family. Two women with a child constitute a family. A single man with a child constitutes a family. Two men with a child constitute a family. A man and a woman with a child constitute a family. But a single woman without a child does not, nor does a single man without a child, two women without a child, two men without a child, or a man and woman without a child.

So where does this leave Joseph Muscat and the glaring gap between his two contradictory claims that all families are equal to Labour but that same-sex couples should neither have the right to marry properly nor the right to adopt children?

Who knows – I think people are so desperate to hear what they want to hear that they are unwilling to see that what they are being promised is birds in the bush. Two men in a civil union, or two women in a civil union, are no more of a family than a man and a woman in a civil union. If you don’t allow them to adopt children or to marry properly – the debate going on in Britain right now, as we speak, where there is as yet no same-sex marriage – then talk of respecting families of all sorts is just so much tosh.

Unfortunately, contemporary lore would have us believe that families can be composed of assorted adults with only a tenuous connection, like in the defunct television series called Friends. You hear people say that their friends are their family, and much in a similar vein. The fact remains that families are composed of far more than just a couple.

The truth is that the Labour Party’s position on same-sex marriage and adoption by same-sex couples is no different to that of the Nationalist Party. It is just not as honest about it. If Labour doesn’t want a huge backlash of anger and disappointment after it sails into government on a wave of false promises and playing about with words, as happened with Alfred Sant and valued added tax, then it had better make itself clear right now.

Must do better

The Labour Party has made a great show of its first-ever national congress and its pseudo-consultations with the general public and special-interest groups, only to come up with 12 brief points that resemble a sort of ‘letter to Father Christmas from Joseph’. This it has called its “Linji Gwida”, and it tells us that it has assembled them after shows of hands at its congress. “This congress resolves that there should be more jobs in Gozo for people who live in Gozo.” If only life were so simple.

Following close on the heels of these 12 points (none of which came with an explanation), we had Labour’s spokesman for information technology, the medical doctor Michael Farrugia, telling us that his party has a cunning plan for IT. One newspaper reported, totally deadpan, “of which no details were given”.

What is this cunning plan? Given Labour’s long and chequered history of technophobia, I dread to think about it. Whatever it is, it’s not going to be pretty.