Guest post: Politicians have to face marriage facts

This is a guest post written by somebody who works for a political party.

There is a strand within mainstream politics that is essentially non-ideological and much more practical than some people make politics out to be.

This strand faces the facts and asks simple questions: what works? what needs to change?

This type of thinking is present in all the parties and can be the catalyst for a matter-of-fact discussion on divorce in response to these questions: Is what we have now working? Does it have unintended consequences?

This is not the same thing as having individual politicians waving a private member’s bill around.

Confusing ‘family’ and ‘marriage’

Some debunking of buzzwords is in order, starting with ‘family’, which politicians tend to use instead of ‘marriage’.

Families are based on human choices about intimate relations and commitment to one another. Marriage, on the other hand, is a public institution regulated by the state, through which the state acknowledges these choices and commitments.

Marriage does not create families. When families change, so does marriage. Divorce does not dissolve families; it simply declares a dead marriage dissolved.

Strong family…

The family is very strong in Malta. You can see the evidence (not necessarily positive) all around you: the lowest EU rate of working married women, ‘mammoni’ galore, high home-ownership and big houses (the family’s ‘nest’), fathers buying/building property for their young children (and leaving it empty for years), lavish weddings, disregard for the collective (clean homes, dirty streets).

Those are just some examples.

One can argue that the family is perhaps too strong: people will say “ghall-familja naghmel kollox” meaning they’d do anything, be it illegal or immoral, for their family.

… weaker marriage

Unrelated to the strength of the family in Malta, marriage is getting weaker.

Maltese men have always lived the double standard. Mass tourism in the last 40 years opened up further opportunities for them.

Thousands of gay men who conformed by getting married now live double lives (and double lies) and some of them crack under the pressure at some point.

The high number of separations is very significant given the context of the still-strong pressure to be seen to have a successful marriage.

Women have gained the confidence and means to walk away from failed marriages. The number of cohabiting couples is increasing and one result is very stark.

A quarter of births out of wedlock

A quarter of all births are now out of wedlock and the proportion is increasing, not decreasing. The number of births last year was 4,127, of which 1,048 (25.4%) were officially ‘out of marriage’. Three babies are born every day in Malta to parents who are not married to each other.

In 2002, the percentage was 14.5%. The increase has been steady since then at about two percentage points a year.

In four years’ time, a third of births in Malta are likely to be out of wedlock. This is a fact Maltese politicians have to face if we are not to give birth to a new ideology: ‘ostrichism’.

The state is undermining marriage

Politicians cannot be unaware that marriage in Malta will wither if it is kept in a cage of old and unreasonable rules.

Separated people who do not bother with the long-drawn-out and difficult process of getting their marriage declared null (which has precisely the same civil, psychological, and emotional effects as divorce) are being refused marriage to their new partners while the state still recognises their long-dead previous marriage.

People want to (re-)marry, but the state does not them to enter into marriage. The state itself is undermining marriage by forcing people to cohabit even if they want to marry.

Some politicians want legalised bigamy

Marriage in Malta does not reflect the actual relationships people are in, and this is the main factor that is undermining this public institution.

Social laws can aim at an ideal (e.g. not making divorce too easy), but they have to reflect reality.

To avoid discussing divorce, some politicians have proposed cohabitation rights.

Interestingly, they have found support from people who haven’t thought about it clearly: you would need cohabitation rights only if being married to somebody else prevents you from marrying the person you live with.

So what these politicians are proposing is a situation in which a person can have both a spouse and a state-recognised concubine (or the male equivalent).

These politicians are proposing the recognition of a second ‘marriage’ without allowing the dissolution of the first. This is nothing but legalised bigamy.

Will cohabitation rights be dissoluble?

This Maltese pastiche of indissoluble marriage, cohabitation rights and legalised bigamy will also meet with an evident difficulty in answer to one question which very few people have yet asked: will cohabitation rights be dissolved if the second relationship fails?

That is, will there be ‘divorce’ from cohabitation rights? If the answer is no, few people will enter into cohabitation rights (if they’re not forced to) – they will prefer free and unencumbered cohabitation. Cohabitation rights will be reserved for people who cannot marry in the first case, that is, gay couples.

The death knell for marriage

If, on the other hand, the answer is yes and cohabitation rights will be dissoluble, then that will be the death knell for marriage.

Most people will then choose dissoluble cohabitation rights with the same privileges and responsibilities of traditional marriage but without being locked in a cage out of which you can never escape.

The politicians who argue against divorce and for cohabitation rights are proposing what is in effect the ‘coup de grâce’ for marriage.

Perverse incentives for cohabitation

This is what practical non-dogmatic politicians should never accept: a perverse incentive that destabilises marriage and creates incentives for cohabitation.

Not that different governments have not been trying very hard to do this already. One example: if you consider the whole gamut of social benefits and other advantages for ‘single parents’, there remains nowadays little incentive to get married. So we shouldn’t be surprised when we wake up to find that 25% of births are now to parents who are not married to each other.

These advantages were necessary a few decades ago, but now they have outlived their need (just like the rent laws).

However, these perverse incentives cannot change without first introducing divorce, as a number of single parents are living with a partner they cannot now marry.

This is the unintended consequence of not introducing divorce: the state has been telling people to cohabit.

Strengthen marriage, make it real

Politicians in both parties now have an opportunity to debate divorce within their parties not on dogmatic grounds but on practical facts and evidence.

From the point of view of the state, marriage can only be strengthened if it reflects real relationships people are actually in, not long-dead ones.

This is an issue that cuts across party lines and the red herring of how to introduce divorce (whether by a free vote in parliament, a government-backed bill or a referendum) will predictably be thrown.

But a discussion about the means is not one about the ends and the substance.

And it cannot keep Maltese politicians at the start of the second decade of the new millennium from facing the facts about the state of marriage in Malta now and in the foreseeable future: one where the state is providing incentives for cohabitation and (unintentionally) undermining marriage, with politicians wanting to legalise bigamy to avoid discussing divorce, and where the stark facts point to a large and increasing proportion of children being brought up by parents who can’t or won’t marry each other.