Take a break from the EP elections

Drunken Catholic adulterers go to heaven, but faithful Episcopalian wives who raise seven children go to hell

There’s a surprise. The National Office of Statistics tells us that single men under 34 outnumber single women of the same age by more than 11,000.

Yet I can hear single young women all over the islands asking the same question that single older women ask: where are all these unattached men?

At least under the age of 34 they don’t usually come with ten tonnes of emotional baggage, several children and a hostile wife who can’t decide who she hates more, her estranged husband or his ‘partner’.

Even allowing for the fact that at least 10 per cent of those single men under 34 are homosexual, this still leaves 9,900 of them spare and unavailable, which sounds like a lot of fun but by all accounts is not.

That’s because those 9,900 single men are spread over the ages of 18 to 34, so that gives you a better understanding of why lots of single girls can’t be bothered to go out anymore. They know that their chances of meeting anyone new are roughly zero. If you’re 30 and looking to settle down and have a baby, a single man of 20 is a pointless statistic.

Knock off the ones who are too much older than you are, the ones who are too much younger, the homosexuals, the brain-dead, the ones who wear fleeces, the aesthetically challenged, those who are interested only in sex, and the situation begins to look more than a little dire. No wonder single young women are complaining. Imagine just how much worse it would be if the genders were more equally balanced.

In the 25 to 34 age cohort, which is when people are generally looking to settle down even if they don’t know it yet, there are 13,660 single men but only 8,440 single women. Seen in this light, you begin to understand why the far right political movement is teeming with young men bristling with fury at the perceived incursion of rivals for this increasingly limited sexual and reproductive resource.

Of course they dress it up, even to themselves, as fear of a different religion or skin colour, or competition for jobs. What they really fear is competition for the rapidly declining supply of nubile women.

So when single ladies moan that there’s ‘no one out there’, technically they’re wrong. It just seems that way, unless you’re particularly keen to take up with somebody who doesn’t take showers, wears bad clothes, knows more about computer games than he does about life, or looks and behaves like an escapee from Wayne’s World.

And when single young men complain that all the best young women have been snapped up and are spoken for, they’re right. So I suppose that’s why they’re hunting elsewhere, reducing the pool even further for those demoralised ladies with a Maltese passport.

You know what to do, girls: leave. There’s a great big sea of men out there – and better still, they have long legs.

No experience, she says

Marie Louise Coleiro Preca meant well when she said that she is embarrassed by Malta’s failure to include even one woman on the list of possible replacements for Giovanni Bonello at the European Court of Human Rights. The government has said that there is no woman who meets the requirements.

Mrs Coleiro Preca ruined her argument by saying that Judge Bonello has demonstrated how it is possible for “even somebody without previous experience as a judge” to do the job, and well.

Judge Bonello was not a judge before he was sent to the ECHR, but on a pan-European scale, he was (and still is) an authority on human rights law. It is this which counts for far more than experience on the bench. To take decisions in a particular area of law, you must have deep knowledge of it, and not extensive experience in presiding over cases as a judge in other fields of law entirely.

A judge who has spent decades presiding over murder trials (which are not decided by him or her in any case, but by a jury) is not better placed for a position on the bench in the European Court of Human Rights than an extremely experienced human rights lawyer. That should stand to reason.

Mrs Coleiro Preca might find difficulty in accepting that Judge Bonello’s experience in human rights law is unparalleled in Malta, because much of it was built up over the Labour government’s years of undemocratic excess. What she should have said is that, for Malta,

Judge Bonello is an impossible act to follow, which means that when looking for a replacement, the government has to start from scratch and can’t even begin to try to match him. He is not proof that a non-judge can do the job, Mrs Coleiro Preca – far from it.

The Passion of Mel Gibson

I find it amusing that the more-Catholic-than-the Pope Mel Gibson, with his chest-beating and his preaching, has become yet another cliché and left his wife of three decades to run off with a super-glamorous Russian gold-digger some years his junior. He is now in the middle of a very expensive divorce.

When questioned about this by highly entertained journalists, Mr Gibson’s press officer replied that his client had been estranged from his wife since being arrested for drunk-driving and making anti-Semitic comments to a police officer with a Jewish surname. So maybe it seems that she left him. “Mr Gibson isn’t cheating,” the press officer said.

Ah, but on his own terms, he is. In the world of Catholicism, having sex with somebody who is not your wife, even if you are divorced or divorcing, is adultery. Mr Gibson is in a state of mortal sin. I do remember something of my Cathecism, even though it was so long ago and it does cross my mind to wonder now why in God’s name children of six were being taught about adultery when they didn’t even know about sex.

Perhaps all along, Mel Gibson was just protesting too much, filming The Passion of the Christ, making ‘the Jews killed Jesus’ remarks to police officers while drunk, fathering seven children with an increasingly put-upon-and-drab-looking wife, and spending a few million of his own personal dollars on building the Holy Family Catholic Church in California.

It can’t have helped their relationship when he was interviewed about ‘that’ film by an Australian newspaper (that’s where he’s from originally) and was asked whether he thinks Protestants are denied eternal salvation. “There is no salvation for those outside the (Catholic) Church,” he replied. “I believe it. Put it this way. My wife is a saint. She’s a much better person than I am.”

Hmmm, it’s always bad news for the wife when a man calls her a saint. It generally means that he’s no longer interested and is about to look elsewhere, but is controlling himself. “She’s Episcopalian, Church of England. She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it’s just not fair if she doesn’t make it. She’s better than I am. But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it.”

Apparently, what the chair says about adulterers is beside the point, because they can still find eternal salvation if they repent on their death-bed after a lifetime of fornication and with their mistress beside them.

Well, I’ve always had the suspicion that many of those who are super-religious in that boastful way are just trying hard to sublimate their urges and to convince themselves and the rest of us that they’re really not bad people.

No, they’re just human.

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