That is where the disconnection started: when all MPs obeyed the order to go to church, regardless of whether they were believers or not. I draw a curtain on what happened at Communion (we have all seen enough scenes to last a lifetime, of people trooping up to receive the Host regardless of their private and also public life).

On that very same day, at the first sitting of the new legislature, all members trooped up to take the oath and all of them took the oath on the Bible. Not one of them opted to confirm his or her loyalty by an affirmation.

There you have Malta in a nutshell – outward signs of a confessional State and complete internal freedom.

Not one MP, to my knowledge, raised a complaint ofhaving the Mass of the Holy Spirit at the beginning of a legislature. Not one MP claimed the right (which exists already) to confirm and affirm instead of taking an oath on the Bible. On the contrary, when the Speaker missed out giving the Bible to Konrad Mizzi to take the oath, someone noticed this and Dr Mizzi was made to perform the ceremony again later.

After all, this is a country where religious feasts often descend into an orgy of drunkenness and where divisions rage from centuries back, where the silverware on show on a feast day co-exists with cases of abject poverty just a couple of hundred metres away.

All this and more is the background to the first Bill being tackled by Parliament. Not a bill regarding an urgent need. Nor the Bill urgently required by the EU to ratify the latest directive on money laundering, which Malta (because of the election) has not done so far, maybe the only country to be late in its implementation.

The Bill, as all know, is to allowpersons of the same sex to marry.

Now I know that the reason for this was, as the Prime Minister explained, to ensure fairness and balance for all so that there will be no second class citizens in this regard, as unfortunately there have been for centuries between those married in church and the pogguti.Those not married in church have been, and maybe still are calledpogguti, regardless of civil weddings.

But in view of what is happening around us, I am not so sure that among the other aims behind this forceful decision to get the Bill approved before the summer recess, there are otherobjectives. I list some in no particular order and simply speculatively.

I ask:

Could this imposed haste be to aid the promoter of this Bill, the indefatigable Helena Dalli, in her bid to become the deputy leader of the Labour Party, considering the first ballot will take place on the morrow of the final vote?

The other speculation regards the Nationalist Opposition. Can this hasty procedure be aimed at further weakening the Nationalist Party, maybe even to the point of seeing it split between its conservative faction led by people like Tonio Fenech and Edwin Vassallo and the modernisers inside the party, aided and abetted by former leader Simon Busuttil?

Those who listened and viewed the debate on Wednesday saw the sad spectacle of a party with its knickers in a twist.Many speakers wentto incredible lengths to explain why they were against the Bill for this or that reason but nevertheless were going to vote in favour, as the party had promised in its manifesto and as the party leader never ceased to remind people.

At the end, only Edwin Vassallo voted against the party whip and against the Bill and he instantly becamethe people’s hero, as witnessed by the comments on social media.

Now remember that just as the Labour Party has its internal election, the Nationalist Party has its own infinitely more momentous one of electing the party leader and the entire leadership. In this election, far more than in the Labour one, the split between conservatives and progressives is now out in the open and not even battling Joseph Muscat can be the gel that fixes the cracks.

In the recent election, some shrewd positioning by Marlene Farrugia showed the existence of a segment of the electorate that was never inside the Nationalist Party. Nurtured properly, there is a conservative backlash that one day may even tap into Labour votes.

If this happens, the Prime Minister and those who decided these things with himwill only have themselves to blame. While there were all the reasons in the world for Malta to legalise gay marriage, there was absolutely no reason for this indecent haste and this railroading of the Bill to the top of the heap of Bills awaiting legislation.

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