Protesting all the way to the gallows

Predictably, the suggestion by the prime minister and by his minister of social policy that we might – just might – move in the direction of divorce legislation has brought out the usual suspects, protesting all the way to the gallows.

The few letters to the editor written by chest-beaters who are unable to distinguish between church and state and between democracy and theocracy have drawn down the opprobrium of ordinary people, who have clogged the internet to have their say. Those having their say can be divided into three broad camps: the ones who are devout Catholics but who do not wish to impose their religious views on the rest of the country; those who are devout Catholics and think that Malta should be run like a theocracy, with the laws of Catholicism as the laws of the state; and, those who are secular in outlook and who find it difficult to understand why we are the only 300,000 adults in the world, if you discount the seriously backward Philippines, with no access to divorce in our own country.

We can consider ourselves one step up from the archaic theocratic mindset of the Philippines only because adultery is no longer a criminal act here. That’s not the case with the Philippines. The other day I read a news story about a married man who had to flee the country because he faced a seven-year prison sentence for having an affair. You may express shock or surprise, but consider this: how is the banning of adultery by the state (which is, in effect, what the criminalisation of adultery amounts to) different to the refusal by the state to allow its citizens to divorce within its borders? The answer is that it is no different at all: both actions by the state are rooted in a theocratic, and not secular, rationale. We sneer at Islamic states which make religious laws the laws of the state, yet those devout Maltese Catholics who wish to see the laws of their religion imposed and retrenched as the laws of the state are no different in outlook. They feel justified in seeking to turn Malta into a theocracy because, as they see it, Catholic rules are the foundation for perfect social order but Islamic rules are not. They cannot stand outside the box and see themselves with the eyes of others, to whom all religious rules, whatever the religion, are much of a muchness.

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A couple of days ago, I was talking to a government minister who said that there are enough Muslims living in Malta, and with the right to vote, to elect an MP – if they gather together in one district, that is. I thought this was particularly amusing, sort of like Alternattiva Demokratika claiming the right to a seat in the house because it has a ‘quota’ spread over the whole of Malta and Gozo. I couldn’t share the minister’s fears, and I didn’t bother trying to explain that this is precisely how I and many thousands of others feel about being dictated to by a minority of theocratic Catholics. Theocratic Catholics are no different to theocratic Muslims. Both types believe that their religious laws are the only possible and acceptable way to run society, and so seek to impose those religious laws on everyone else by making them the laws of the state.

As somebody pointed out on one of the internet discussions beneath a letter from a Holy Joe or Pious Pat: why stop at divorce? Why not ban contraception, adultery, sodomy and all forms of sex outside marriage? Why not, indeed? Let’s not forget that adultery and sodomy really were criminal acts here in Malta, and that contraceptive devices could be bought only under the counter or on the black market. Before that, the only forms of ‘contraception’ were onanism and anal sex, though even these, strictly speaking, are against the by-laws and regulations of the Catholic Church. I really would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during the discussions that led to the writing of the rule-book, as the finer points of onanism and heavy petting were philosophically flogged with reference to the New and Old Testaments.

When the rule-book was written, people married before they were 21. Now they’re marrying later and later, if at all, and not for want of trying but for want of a suitable spouse. Gone are the days when girls married the first halfway decent and semi-solvent chap who came along, because that was the only way to get a life and the fearsome alternative was – breathe the word – spinsterhood. Gone are the days when a young man snagged the first clean – it was of paramount importance – woman without a moustache made known to him by the local huttaba.

I don’t think there are many 30-year-old virgins about, all the same, and the instinctive reaction that there must be something wrong with them is probably accurate in many cases. I don’t know about you, but a man in his 30s who has never had sex on the grounds that he has never been married rings far more alarm bells for me than a man of the same age who can’t keep it in his pants. In the past I knew young women who went out with their boyfriends for a long time, years even, and then when the relationship ended, it transpired that encounters between the two had never gone beyond what American kids call first base. “What?!” I’d yell, trying as hard as possible to be tactful, and failing miserably. “He never made a pass? He never tried? And he pushed you off when you did? And you didn’t realise something was seriously wrong?”

Lots of Maltese girls in the past were horribly naïve because they were taught to believe that the man who doesn’t try it on behaves that way because he ‘respects you’, and not because of some other reason. Saddled with a chap who never tried it on, they didn’t realise that he was simply not interested in having sex with them, either because he was gay and still coming to terms with it, or because there was just no sexual attraction. It worked the other way round, too. Amazing though it might sound, Maltese girls were re-educated out of their sexuality, and so the absence of any sexual tug towards their boyfriend didn’t bother them unduly. They thought it was a good thing, because sex before marriage was a bad thing, so best to be untroubled by sexual attraction for the entire duration of a six-year courtship. And once they had walked down the aisle…oh, brother, the seeds that were sown, of so many disastrous marriages.

As Jane Austen failed to write, it is a truth universally acknowledged that if a man doesn’t try to have sex with you before marriage, there is no way he is going to try afterwards. And if a woman is still fighting off a man’s attempts to go beyond first base during a protracted engagement while a wedding is planned in detail for four years hence, that man had better give up and find somebody else. Whatever the bishops say, it’s not a good sign.

There’s only one reason why two people who are going out together for a long time don’t have sex: they don’t want to. They can dress it up as religion and respect, which helps them to stave off the truth, but then when they get married and that excuse disappears down the spout….oh dear. I bet that’s one thing they don’t teach at Cana.

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Philip Carabott, who heads the state healthcare service’s clinic for sexually transmitted diseases, expressed his dismay a few weeks ago at Maltese society’s apparent predilection for anal sex – anal sex between men and women, that is, and not between men and other men. Even really young people are at it, and he’s shocked because they don’t use a prophylactic.

Of course they don’t use one, Philip. They have anal sex not because they particularly like anal sex (the women certainly don’t), but because the man wants to have sex and he doesn’t want to use a condom – and he doesn’t want to get the woman pregnant either, not because he cares about her, but because he just doesn’t want the hassle. I’m sorry to be so graphic on a sunny Sunday morning, but this is a case of any orifice will do. And this is the duality of Malta – the chest-beating ‘we are more holy than the pope’ veneer, beneath which lies behaviour that would have had us all biblically decimated by fire and brimstone, or turned to pillars of salt, had we lived two thousand years before Christ rather than two thousand years after him. You know what the trouble is? We’re in collective denial. We can see reality for what it is, but we can’t even admit it to ourselves.

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Of course, the bishops feel obliged to get a word in. While their congregations mix, multiply and form what, in Britain, are called jigsaw families, they continue to sit on their thrones at the water’s edge, trying to hold back the tide of divorce. This is rather odd, given that in the rest of the civilised world, Catholics who apply to have their marriage annulled by the church authorities are told by those church authorities to first ensure that they set the divorce train in motion. It’s only in Malta and the Philippines that the Catholic Church doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state. Everywhere else, it does. The Catholic Church will not start annulment proceedings in countries where there is divorce – for which read everywhere except…you got it – unless the couple has already applied for a divorce, because it cannot and will not undermine the laws of the state. If it grants an annulment to a couple who are not divorced, it will be creating an anomalous situation and running into headlong conflict with the state, which orders society on the basis of civilly-recognised marriage and civilly-recognised divorce.

What upsets me most about the arguments put forward by some leading clerics is that they are wholly irrational, illogical and no better than those put forward by the poorly educated people spouting off all over the internet. One expects better from men who spend many years in tertiary education and whose intellect is supposedly disciplined.

Now the bishops have released a statement warning against the grave dangers of cohabitation and divorce. I really can’t understand what they are trying to say. Is it that the consequences of divorce are somehow – though I can’t work out how – more deleterious to society than the consequences of what is already going on? Is it that men and women should be prevented from living together unless they are married to each other – and if so, how and why? We all know that the situation is far from ideal, but that’s the way of the world. Things are never ideal, and human relationships should not be controlled or regulated with an iron fist and pain of death or imprisonment, as they were in the past and still are today in certain parts of the world. The bishops might as well argue in this half-assed way that marriage is bad for society because it is clearly a source of so much distress to so many people.

The experiences of other countries bear witness to the problems that divorce and cohabitation bring to society, the bishops said. I live here, as the bishops do, and quite frankly, I can’t see any difference between what is happening to familial relations in Malta and what is happening in ‘other countries’ – by which, I imagine, the bishops mean Europe rather than, say, Saudi Arabia, Iran, China or the Philippines.

It’s the mention of divorce by the prime minister, no less, which has stirred the bishops to action. Reams of comments calling for the Armed Forces of Malta to let boatloads of people, including pregnant women and children, drown or float off to their deaths by starvation and exposure have prompted no similar episcopal panic about the morals of the flock. It was “the situation which developed after the last general election” that prompted them to speak, they said. Unfortunately, what they said was nothing new. Messages about the rules and beliefs of the Catholic Church are relevant only to particularly devout Catholics and not to anybody else. Sometimes, even devout Catholics don’t find them relevant. This might be a contradiction in terms, but even the most fervent members of prayer-groups end up doing what they want if they see fit. The yearning to love and be loved exerts a far more primeval pull on people than the need to obey religious rules, and when it comes to sex, the pull is more primeval still, as many a priest has discovered to his perplexity, which is why so very many of them are now fathers, lovers and husbands (and good for them).

The bishops included in their statement a vain boast: “For many years it was the church alone that offered formation and accompanied couples in their experience of marriage and the family. It was also the church that helped those who encountered difficulties in their married life.” In that case, it should be “the church alone” that stands up and takes the applause for what is happening now. If every marriage that collapses is the result of years of childhood duttrina classes, a Cana course and advice from the parish priest – what can I say? Nothing, really, because I’m one of those who thinks that whatever you do or don’t do, in a society where people are not afraid of punishment or destitution, marriages are going to break down. They broke down in the past, too, in their thousands, but the fact was concealed by the pretence of living in the same household.

The bishops’ conclusion was particularly and irritatingly illogical. Those who speak against divorce are in favour of marriage. Those who speak in favour of divorce are against marriage. What? I think the bishops will find that most of those who speak in favour of divorce do so because they are in favour of marriage. They are uncomfortable with the chaos that has developed as a result of the absence of divorce legislation. People who favour divorce are like those who favour marriage: they are deeply conservative, and like things to be neatly sorted out and regulated, so that everyone knows where he or she stands within the law. Those who are wildly liberal or anarchic can no more be bothered with divorce than they are with marriage. In their mind, the state has no business regulating the relationships between couples, so they stay out of the loop.

I can’t see why we’re having this debate, anyway. It’s 2008, and there are only 300,000 adults in the free world who have no access to divorce in their own country. Is that because the rest of the free world is wrong and we’re right? For our next trick, we can try reinventing the wheel – a triangular one might get us places fast.

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.