So the laws against pornography, blasphemy and the vilification of “the Roman Catholic Church and other cults recognised by law” are to be repealed. And not before time: they were already anachronistic back in the early 1990s when an English actress kicked a wooden cross (not even a crucifix) across the stage at the Manoel Theatre, in a production of The Duchess of Malfi, half the audience walked out, there was a huge fuss in the newspapers, people didn’t talk about anything else, and the Minister for Culture intervened personally to halt the outrage.
Had these laws been repealed then, people would have been forced to grow up sooner. Instead we had a situation where the only sorts of Maltese people who could afford to travel – and so had some kind of understanding of just how sheltered the island was – were the very ones protesting most loudly about how shocking it is to kick a piece of wood across the stage in a theatrical production. Maybe they thought that in the roughly contemporaneous Schindler’s List, they really burned Jews and gassed them.
The news coverage of Owen Bonnici’s press conference yesterday revealed the delightful irony that Mark Cswamilleri, who had ended up in court and in trouble with the police for publishing a crass and rough-edged short story in the university newspaper he edited at the time, was prosecuted under legislation enacted by Dom Mintoff’s government in 1975. Camilleri is committed to the ideology and memory of Mintoff as a hero. I’ll bet he didn’t know that. I’ll bet none of the Taghna Lkoll Labour crowd did, either.
Muscat’s party never bothered to tell them during the general election campaign, though they did make sure everybody knew that Mintoff “decriminalised homosexuality” (he didn’t; he decriminalised sodomy, which is wholly different and which included heterosexual relationships too, but obviously not relationships between lesbians). Now we discover that, concurrently, their darling liberal hero Dom Mintoff legislated against anything which “unduly emphasises sex, crime, horror, cruelty and violence”. My observation is that under this law of Mintoff’s, his own party should have been banned.
Mark Camilleri, incidentally, was celebrated by the incoming Labour government with an appointment to the chair of the National Book Council, despite being a barely coherent 20-something who can’t speak or write English and who appears to have difficulty even forming thoughts and expressing them when speaking Maltese.
Pornography has been on public display, in the form of magazines on the top shelf, for rather a long time already. The law is what it is, but let’s face it, it has long been a dead letter already. The prosecution of Mark Camilleri a few years ago was completely absurd and should never have happened. He was, in fact, found not guilty. Similarly, the law against sodomy had long been a dead letter when Mintoff’s government repealed it in the early 1970s. The Labour Party and its first-followers, in the last general election campaign, made it seem as though Malta was an island full of cowering gay men being dragged to the courts before 1975. In fact, it was an island – or at least a Grand Harbour area – full of male prostitutes touting themselves for sailors, military men and married Maltese men, and they were as open about it as were the women. Even I, a child at the time, couldn’t fail to notice and had a name for them, which in adulthood I was fascinated to discover is actually used in Thailand: “Mummy, is that man a man or is he a lady-boy?” The gay men who stayed in the closet did so because of feared social censure and not because of the law. After all, there was no law against preferred lesbian sexual activity and no lesbians came out, either.
So now we will also have porn-shops, a by-product of having Mintoff’s porn-law repealed, when only a few years ago there was chaos when somebody suggested that it would be a good idea to have a condom-dispensing machine on the university campus. You really have to laugh. And of course, this represents a major new business opportunity for the operators of lap-dancing clubs who will be the first into it, unless the Economy Minister’s chief of staff beats them to it by converting his tacky clothes boutiques into this more lucrative retail sector.
As for Owen Bonnici, I notice that he doesn’t have half as much eagerness to repeal the law on criminal libel (the civil one can stay; civil suits are civil suits between two individuals and not The Police vs A Journalist). Even as he fails to do anything about it, his colleagues in the cabinet are pursuing journalists, including me, using the police. How illiberal is that? But of course, it’s way easier to repeal a blasphemy and porn law that nobody uses any more than it is to repeal a criminal libel law which your colleagues are busy using right now as we speak. Freedom for porn, and not freedom of speech, is obviously the priority for Owen Bonnici and his mates.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com