[Daphne – You really have a lot to learn about the law, don’t you? Well, this is how it works. Whatever you own before marriage is yours alone. So if you own a house before marriage, get married, and move into it with your spouse, your spouse has the right to live there if it is the marital home, even if the marriage comes to grief, but does not have the right to 50% of the property. Regarding the house being owned by a company – what can I say? Ignorance of the law is no excuse: if she was stupid enough to move into a house without checking who or what owned it, then she has only herself to blame. Trust is one thing; blind idiocy is another. The law is there to protect the weak not the stupid. And going to live in a house owned by a company is not a ‘loophole in the law’. This woman could have avoided all her problems by refusing to go an live in a house that belongs to somebody else.]

[Daphne – Sigh. Look, Adrian, let me explain it to you in language you might be able to understand. You say you own your own house – bully for you; I admire that kind of initiative and hard work. You also say you are not homosexual. So let’s say you start going out with a woman and quite like her. After a while, dropping her off at her house every night gets to be a little ridiculous, especially if she still lives with her parents or shares a place with friends. So you say, look, why don’t you move in with me for a while, let’s see how it goes. And she does. A year later, her charming idiosyncrasies have become major irritating habits and if she says Cheerio once more when she heads out of the house you are going to find it difficult to restrain yourself from hitting your head against the wall to avoid doing something much worse. In addition, you’ve met somebody else and you’ve fallen in love. You ask your live-in girlfriend to leave. She consults a lawyer and says, sorry honey, but I have rights. You can’t throw me out. I’m here to stay and you’ll have to pay me to leave, or buy me another place.

To answer your question as to why you must get married to have rights: simple – marriage is a civil contract by which the two parties undertake various things, among them those rights and obligations. In all areas of life, contracts regulate agreements between people, and this is no different. What you are saying here – that people should have rights simply by dint of living together – is like saying that if I break into a house and squat in it, it becomes mine.]

[Daphne – No, you are the one making an ass of yourself, by imagining that there can or even should be such a grotesque thing as a law to protect people who have no right to protection against eviction. I am going to repeat this until I am blue in the face: marriage is not a religious thing. It is a civil contract which gives the married parties rights that they would not have if they were not married. Hence, if you want those rights, you get married. If you don’t want those rights, you don’t get married. But you can’t have your cake and eat it: you can’t avoid marriage and still get the rights. Also, and this is a crucial point: if people avoid marriage so as to avoid those rights, how then can the state arrogate unto itself the ability to foist those rights and obligations on them regardless of the fact that they are not married and have sought thereby to avoid them? The act of living together shouldn’t give people obligations towards each other. If they want those obligations, they get married. Obviously, if they haven’t got married, they don’t want them. People like you miss the wood for the trees. The problems are (1) the absence of divorce and (2) the absence of civil partnerships for homosexual couples. If Malta were to have those two things, then all this fussing about ‘rights’ for cohabitees would be ridiculous nonsense (as it already is). If you want rights, you marry and get them. That’s what marriage is for.]

[Daphne – Oh for crying out loud: homosexuals make their own problems here. The only thing you don’t have that heterosexuals do is the ability to get married – and don’t forget that there are literally thousands of heterosexual couples who can’t get married either, because there is no divorce. How are they more privileged than a homosexual couple? All the homosexual people I know in Malta – men and women – live perfectly normal, happy, contented social lives and home lives. This is the golden rule: you have to accept yourself and the way you are if you want others to accept you, and that doesn’t just apply to homosexuals. The ones who are miserable in Malta are those who, deep down, can’t accept themselves and go around sniffing out rejection and prejudice, which they then find precisely because of their off-putting attitude.Malta is actually an extremely tolerant society, which might seem a paradox given the intolerance at legislative levels. But my observation has been that there are goings-on here that would never be considered acceptable elsewhere, except among the under-class.]

Good point.
Not only ‘Religion is the Opiate of the People’, politics is as well.

Est modus in rebus, Mr P. Shaw, like we swallowed every word the Prime Minister uttered before the last election. I know so many people who are now saying Mea Culpa, that I lost count of the list. The government promised one thing and is now doing the opposite. The same tragedy, of those thousands who voted PN in the last election, believing every word of the PN promised, and that’s the price of democracy for you!, The promises, may I jog your memory, were to help the people decide whom to vote for, Il-par idejn soddi or for the infamous Sant.

We are now reaping what we sowed, yesterday. I paid 950 euros on my car insurance plus licence. What about the sky high electricity bills that Dr Gonzi tells us are to stop people from wasting electricity. We pay for what we use, so why interfere in our private life. Due to this, we are now living in a regressed state of having heaters left in storage because we cannot afford to use them. Our ACs are left for spiders to hide in during summer. We are once again using fans, when we worked so hard to live in a modern society. Our roads are a disgrace to our country; they look like the bloody Gaza Strip, fatal to all drivers who on a daily bases drive around them. Where are the funds from the EU, we were promised decent roads to drive on way back in 2003.

What about our state of the art hospital, one has to wait years for an operation he rightfully deserves. I could not believe my ears when I heard John Dalli himself, talking about the state the hospital is in, who is to blame…don’t tell me the PL is to blame for this?

Why don’t you talk about the raping of the south of Malta (guess you might live miles away to care), the power station, the fish farms that have now destroyed and killed the sea bed and polluted the once beautiful crystal blue sea. The recycling plant in Marsascala. What about the now proposed incinerator at Marsaxlokk, drafted without having done any health assessment to see how it will effect the people who reside in the vicinity. And, not to forget to mention, another extension at the Free Port near the sailing club.

Where is the paradise we were promised by joining the EU? What has been gained for the common layman and the many families now living in poverty? What about the people who are losing their jobs every day that goes by, Mr.P Shaw? Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Sharon Ellul Bonici might have been against the EU at that time or tried to give us a real picture of what lies ahead, but I have never heard her lie to anyone and all she ever said was the truth, so, if I vote for her and in time utter ‘mea culpa’, at least it will be by trial and error, and not because she lied to us.