Allowing women to vote was once against ‘the natural order of things’
The photograph shows men lining up to read information posted in the window at the headquarters of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (those who opposed giving women the vote) in the United States. Women got the vote there in 1920, with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which provided: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
This was my column in The Malta Independent on Sunday, yesterday.
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One of the saddest aspects of the divorce referendum aftermath (fear not, this is not about that subject) was reading Eddie Fenech Adami’s words about divorce being the thin end of the wedge, leading on to what he intimated were terrible and unnatural evils to do with homosexuals getting above themselves and demanding rights which belong only to heterosexuals.
His words have been echoed by those who think it would upset the natural order of things if homosexuals were to be allowed to marry somebody of their gender.
Talk of the ‘natural order of things’ conveniently bypasses the fact that marriage does not exist in nature and that it is entirely a social construct, having come into existence not for reasons of love between a man and a woman but to safeguard property and inheritance rights and ensure the legitimacy of children.
That latter necessity is from where the proscription on sex outside marriage stems, and why a wife’s adultery was considered a fatal transgression while a husband’s was not.
When I say this to people who quarrel with me about the mystical union of marriage and how it should be kept above and beyond the reach of mere homosexuals, I am pounced on with the inevitable ‘Ha!’ by those who imagine they have found the flaw in my argument.
“You see,” they say, “marriage is for the procreation of children! So we are right after all – it is a vehicle for reproduction.”
But no, not at all: it is the property and inheritance rights that are the primary consideration and not the children. The children, to put it as brutally as it would have been put in the days when marriage really was seen as nothing more than a contract – for that is how it started out, before the fanciful notions were piled onto it – were there for no other reason than to service those very same property rights, that very same inheritance.
Children were not children in the way that we think of them today. They were heirs. They were brought into the world solely for dynastic reasons or to work within the household’s economic unit, the farm or the workshop.
If the justification for marriage were truly the ability to reproduce, as so many people claim when fighting against the possibility of same-sex marriages, then the marriages of the infertile – including all the thousands struggling with IVF and the like – would be null and void, and women over the age of 50 would be denied permission to marry.
Perhaps those who approach the anti-gay marriage argument from the reproduction perspective might like to consider applying the exact same arguments against the marriages of older heterosexuals. A heterosexual couple in their 50s are about as likely to have children together as a homosexual couple of any age.
I understand the reservations of those who think that way, because many years ago, while I was still growing up and trying to come to terms with the world about me, I used to feel that way myself.
But only a little bit and not for long.
I soon came round to the conclusion, as very many people do after trials and tribulations, that life is fragile and short, that we can all be undone in a moment because we hang by a thread at the mercy of an erratic fate, and that consequently, we should seize and celebrate whatever adds to the sum total of human happiness, rather than persisting in finding new reasons to perpetuate misery for its own sake or because we think that it is ‘the natural order of things’.
The way I think now is this: if two people want to get married, let them. It’s no skin off anyone else’s nose and none of our business either, assuming they are old enough to enter into that kind of contract in a country where you’ve got to be 21 to go into a casino but can commit yourself to marriage at 18, or 16 with parental permission.
What makes me saddest about all this is not the disparagement and fear of other human beings because they are homosexual, but the total lack of insight that people who think this way have into their own thoughts. They don’t realise that their reasoning is exactly like that of those who disparaged and feared (and in some parts of the world, still do) other human beings because they are women.
The historic records and the newspapers of the time show that in the days of emergent feminism the very same arguments used today against homosexuals were used then against women. People genuinely believed what they said and wrote about the natural order of things being overturned by allowing women, for example, to vote or manage their destiny, in the very same way that Eddie Fenech Adami genuinely believes that homosexuals are another class of person who shouldn’t be allowed to marry each other.
Just as the former prime minister speaks with total conviction about the evils of gay marriage, so countless other men (and even very many women, oddly enough) spoke against the evils of allowing women to vote in general elections. Allowing women to vote, allowing married women to manage their own property, to have rights over their own children, would upset the natural order of things.
I once asked an elderly (intelligent and opinionated) relative how she stood for a situation in which she was told that she was not fit to vote because she was a woman.
“We just accepted it,” she said. “It was the way things were, the way they had always been. We took it for granted.” There you have it: the natural order of things. They took it for granted.
And now, we find it unbelievable that they did so until some very difficult women – probably dismissed as lesbians who hated men – began to throw themselves under horses at the races in England.
We needn’t go that far back, either, even though being told they were not fit to take a decision on politicians is within the experience of Maltese women in their 80s and 90s. When even women of my generation got married, the law gave the husband total control of communal property, including the marital home, and of the children.
Wives, in the rare event that they worked, did not even have rights over their own earnings. As part of the community of property, they fell under the husband’s full administration. The law gave the husband complete autonomy in deciding matters involving place of residence, administration of property and anything to do with the children, without the need to consult or inform the wife.
Women lived in a precarious state where the husband, should he see fit to do so, could sell the marital home without their knowledge, still less their consent. There were countless cases in which the marital home was used by the husband to make good for borrowing, put up as security for a business loan and then lost, even gambled away, all without the wife’s knowing about it until she woke up to read in the newspaper the notice of a judicial sale, or until she found letters from the bank sequestered away in some drawer.
Now, just two decades later, we look back and wonder how in heaven’s name we thought such a situation acceptable or tolerable. It seems horrific, something out of the dark ages, but it was still like that in the early 1990s and people took it for granted as the natural order of things.
It was the natural order of things that a married woman could not buy a car on hire purchase because it was her husband who had to sign the bills of exchange, and in whose name the car consequently was, even if she paid the deposit and instalments herself.
The natural order of these things wasn’t questioned until my generation began to get married in the late 1980s. We were the first to carry on working after marriage in any significant number (and the number was not significant at all), and so we were the first to really discover in a big way that we couldn’t buy things with our own money unless we had our husband’s permission, while he could buy things with his money and even ours without even telling us.
I will never forget the sense of anger, humiliation, degradation and injustice I felt when, in 1991 and about to move into our new home, I popped down to the shops to put a deposit on a much-needed large American fridge and get it delivered, with the balance paid on delivery because that is the way things should be done. The salesman told me that unless I paid the full amount before delivery, then I would have to come back with my husband so that they could get his signature on the order note. Given that I was the one paying for the ruddy thing, and not my husband, I told him that he could keep his fridge and hopefully find a nice man to sell it to. But of course, it wasn’t his fault. It was the law.
A lot of women must have been as angry as I was on making the same discoveries at roughly the same time, because something gelled. When the White Paper on the new family law, Shab Indaqs Fiz-Zwieg (Equal Partners in Marriage) was published soon after that, there were the exact same arguments about undoing the natural order of things.
“You must have a head of household,” people said, all of them men. “How can you have two captains of a ship?” And of course, the captain had to be the husband because it would undo the natural order of things to place a woman in charge of a man and his earnings. We were still living in the Mad Men era even though it was 1993.
I have no doubt that we will eventually come to see our reluctance to allow homosexual marriage with the same incredulity that we now regard past reluctance to allow women to vote in general elections, or a legal situation which dictated that the husband called all the shots and did as he chose without consultation, while the wife was utterly powerless to do anything autonomously other than pack her bags and leave him, whereupon she lost her right to the marital home because of ‘abandonment’. Oh, and she had to leave without the children.
So when it comes to homosexual marriage, let us not be so categorical about what is and what isn’t the natural order of things, what should be allowed and what will bring down the wrath of the heavens, always bearing in mind that when women were finally allowed to vote – and for the first time ever be represented in parliament and not left unrepresented as though they did not exist or were children – there actually were people who thought that the end of the world was nigh.
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What’s up with Dr. Eddie Fenech Adami? Can he not stop haunting Dr. Gonzi?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/18/world/asia/18iht-philippines18.html?_r=1
Still the dream of many men: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110619/ap_on_re_as/as_indonesia_obedient_wives
A woman who thinks for herself.
No wonder the Neanderthals despise you.
Daphne, I rate this as one of your best ever articles. Well done!
In Switzerland, where a referendum’s held on anything under the sun, women earned the right to vote in 1971 – almost 100 years after the women of Zurich began to stamp their feet.
When you don’t get involved in partisan talks, you can surely write a good and unbiased article.Well done.
[Daphne – My articles about politics are no different, nor is the thinking and reasoning which leads to them being written. You just happen not to agree with them and so can’t see it.]
Excellent article and I agree with all of it. At my age it has taken some cold, hard reasoning to accept gay marriage. However I still have a mental block regarding the adoption of children by a male gay couple, but – wait for it – not the same reservations about a female gay couple bringing up a child, especially if the child has been brought to term by one of the partners in the gay relationship.
I would like to hear some more about this.
I like comparing homosexuality to an electrical mistake ,something went wrong during the assembly of a complicated equipment,this time the human brain,nobody can pin point what went wrong,but just the same it did.
What any manufacterer would do ,as soon as they find out,is destroy the faulty equipment.
But what do we do ,because we are human beings etc, we try to adapt our laws(,most of them natural laws) to integrate these unfortunates into our society.
The more we give them the more they expect,they even go so far as dictating and imposing on us their rights. I am not implying that they should not have what is due to them. But here comes the million dollar question. What should be due to them?
They should be made aware that they are different and what is intended for normal (hard word) people might not be fit for them. Marriage is a case in point, it was meant for man and woman.
After all if they love each other so much ,they can still do so without having to get married.
I expect a thrashing for what I wrote,but there is always a price to pay for sticking to one’s convictions.
[Daphne – Why do people with prejudices always mistake them for principled convictions? Your description of homosexuality as something that went wrong in the production line is a little curious. By that same token, every human being who doesn’t look like Angelina Jolie or George Clooney, with the brain of Bill Gates, 20/20 vision and the athletic prowess of an Olympic runner is a factory second. Something went wrong in the production process of all of us, Silvio, which is why we are human beings and not gods. All talk about homosexuals not being viable in biology because ‘they can’t reproduce’ (ridiculous – they can, because they have the full set of equipment, and will if they must, as evidenced by the large number of Maltese homosexuals of both genders who are or were married and have children) is silly. Stupid people are not biologically viable either, because they wouldn’t survive in nature. They would take all the wrong decisions and be eaten alive by a crocodile. And what about people with poor vision, in nature? How would they have hunted their prey and survived? That’s right, they couldn’t. I don’t like your eugenics-type arguments. But above all, remember this: unless you plan to have no children or grandchildren, you’d be best off changing your attitude. Nature has a funny way of confronting us with our own biases.]
How exactly are homosexuals “imposing their rights” on you, Silvio? It’s not as if they force you to have anal sex or something.
Excuse the crude imagery, but that’s precisely what you’re implying,
And “unfortunates”? “Angli” is bad enough, but this?
May I also add that not only should you, as a full blooded heterosexual (or so I assume), not condemn homosexuals. You should be happy they’re around. Leaves more fillies for heterosexual men.
[Daphne – ‘Leaves more fillies for heterosexual men’. Hardly. Aren’t you missing something here? Lots of those fillies prefer other fillies and won’t be interested in Silvio.]
I assure you I have no prejudices against homosexuals. It’s their life and they have a right to live it as they deem fit.
What I am against is same sex marriages. I appreciate that in a few years time I will have to accept it, because that is the way the world is moving. But that does not mean I have to approve of it? Just like people who voted against divorce have to accept it but they can still not agree with it.
I was only trying to cheer him up, Daphne. Could never understand this fear and loathing of homosexuals.
“The more we give them the more they expect,they even go so far as dictating and imposing on us their rights.”
What have we given them? Please explain.
[silvio – I assure you I have no prejudices against homosexuals. It’s their life and they have a right to live it as they deem fit….What I am against is same sex marriages].
Please stop contradicting yourself. By refusing them marriage (and by getting married, they take nothing from you), you deny them the opportunity to live as they deem fit.
Inadequate beings cherish an artificially created false sense of superiority. Prohibition of marriage to gay people is one example of this.
@ silvio:
Why exactly don’t you approve of same-sex marriage?
Does it ever occur to Fenech Adami, and also conservative MPs within the PN fold, that gays and lesbians actually have feelings? That some words actually offend and are not easily forgivable by the electorate they affect?
Dear Ms. Caruana Galizia,
Allow me to commend this article. Few people have the ability to acquire the same analytical skills that you possess. Indeed this article truly shows the Liberal way of thinking.
I am reading a book which highlights the oppression of totalitarianism. The author states that combined Socialism and Liberalism only holds in theory and those speaking about coalition of liberals and socialists is just myth. So let us remind Joseph Muscat that what he is speaking about is just a fallacy.
I hail from the south of the island, brought up in a socialist-thinking environment, and until now I can’t understand why I find your arguments highly interesting and sometimes I agree to most of the arguments you bring forward to us? It’s maybe a paradox.
When I started my first degree, and was exposed to different thinking and read different interesting books, I started viewing the Labour Party and its supporters quite differently. Their arguments are quite conservative and believe me you won’t stand a minute on the same table with these people.
I have realized that it’s better to lock myself up in my bedroom and read an interesting book than mix with these people.
When I defend some economic policies put forward by the government, they start telling me that I am fading away, and that I was influenced by my lecturers when I was at university. It is really not true. They start telling you ‘don’t forget your roots’.
Well now I understand the ‘lanzit’ that you speak about. They cannot digest the fact that a person may have progressed well in his career. Instead of working hard and aiming high they want people to stay where they started out.
Now, I understand well when you argue that they want il-Partit to move on in their life. If I waited il-Partit I wouldn’t have done 3 degrees and starting the fourth one in the UK this year, I would have wasted 15 years of my life.
I conclude by saying that it’s not true that all Labour supporters despise you. I honestly like you.
Luigi
Trust you Daphne to give the right reasoning and answers to a very delicate issue. Thank you.
Until the late 1980s, the wife’s salary was added on to that of the husband and taxed at the highest rate. Working hard to hand over two-thirds of the income to the government was not on, especially if the family had young children.
That one got sorted out sometime around 1989. Where was the MLP between 1971 and 1987 on this? Safeguarding the jobs of the men, I guess. We’re still not there yet.
Earlier this year my wife went the Malta Resources Authority to sign some forms related to a subsidy on solar panels for our house in Malta and the lady (!) at the desk kept insisting that the husband’s signature was required since the money was going into a joint account.
[Daphne – Yes, but she would have asked the same of you. That’s the difference now. If she hadn’t asked your wife for your signature, she would have been doing exactly the same as was done with husbands pre 1993: ignore the existence of the other spouse.]
‘safeguarding the jobs of men’
When I earned Lm115 a month (before tax and NI deductions) I was told repeatedly that I was ‘stealing’ that money ‘minn halq l-ulied l-irgiel li m’ghandhomx xoghol’ and that it was a disgrace that I should ‘take a man’s job’.
El Topo.
If the MLP was not around between 1971 and 1987, you would not have had the luxury of adding your wife’s salary to yours, there wouldn’t have been the need, as women’s salaries were to low at that time to be of any significance in paying tax, it is only between 1971 and 1987 that women’s salary was given the respect due and raised to the equivalence of men’s……thanks to MLP between 1971 1nd 1987.
El Gatto
[Daphne – Rubbish. Perhaps you don’t remember Agatha Barbara saying that women who enter employment are stealing jobs from breadwinners (men), and perhaps you don’t know that when women on the public sector payroll got married, they were sacked automatically. Yes, under Labour. Why were they sacked? Ah, because now that they had a man to keep them, they should be moved out to clear the way for a BREADWINNER. That’s why all the lady teachers in state schools were Miss and most of the lady teachers in church schools were Mrs. Once the Misses became Missuses, they were forced out of the state schools and had to look for work in the private schools, where the pay was lower.]
R.C. Agius – If you had to conduct a survey of how many individuals paid income tax at its highest rate between 1971 until the tax reforms of the late 80s, you’d be surprised by the ridiculous low number. A married couple with each spouse earning a reasonable salary would be hit by the maximum rate. People set-up “companies”, whose profits were taxed at half the maximum individual rate or just evaded tax.
The PN reforms gave a married working couple the option of an individual assessment and lowered the maximum individual tax rate to 35%, leaving considerably more money in their pocket. The corporate tax was slightly upped to 35%. No more need for businessmen to set up ghost companies, risk incurring heavy penalties for evading tax or for married women to stay at home just because it wasn’t worth it. The end result was more money for people to spend, a booming economy and a bigger tax intake for the government. It’s a way of thinking that was alien to the MLP.
@El Topo May I add that the maximum tax rate at that time was 65%, perhaps that was also part of the natural order of things theory.
The history of woman is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known; the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts. – Oscar Wilde
If I am not mistaken, a hundred years ago, not all Maltese MEN were allowed to vote either. Only those owning property did.
It is not surprising therefore that in those days, women did not have the vote either.
[Daphne – Many women owned property, Dee, and didn’t have a vote. The vote wasn’t tied to property; it was tied to owning property AND being a man. Then all Maltese men were given the vote, but no women were, property-owning or not, until after the Second World War. The Catholic Church opposed it, describing it as part of the destabilising influence of ideas about equal rights. The Nationalist Party opposed it on the grounds that women were not ready to assume the responsibility of voting. And the Malta Labour Party won by a landslide: 24 seats to the PN’s 7, if I recall correctly. Those who don’t learn history’s lessons are condemned to repeat the same mistakes.]
I think the general consensus against women having the vote had to do with the opinion that a woman would vote according to what her husband’s wishes and not her own.
On a lighter tone, not having the vote did not stop women from giving an opinion about politics or politicians either. I remember being told how a maternal great grandmother who was a Stricklandjana, used to remove Strickland’s picture from the mantlepiece when the parish priest came round to bless the house. Then she would swear to him that she was not a Stricklandjana so that the parish priest would not withhold blessing her house.
‘The general consensus’ was no such thing. Many women were not married, but still denied the right to vote.
Headline of the year:
‘Former Maltese PM morphs into Starchbishop’.
(‘Splits and destroys his own Party’)
Next day headline:
‘Considers his actions as restoring ‘the natural order of things’.
Thank you – extremely well said. You clearly and skilfully articulated arguments about an issue that should be a non-issue.
Hopefully the women and voting scenario will hit closer to home in Malta to snap people into rationality, in a way that arguments like inter-racial marriage wouldn’t since we never really had to deal with that as a nation.
Logic in our political scene (even if from an observer) is a huge relief.
They can marry as much as they like as long that they can’t adopt and foster children.
[Daphne – Then perhaps you could advocate enforced sterilisation of homosexuals, so that they can’t have their own children. Or, if they do, have them snatched away and fostered at birth.]
What you are suggesting, is not such a bad idea.
Let’s give it a try and see how many agree. I’ll be the first one to back you up.
so what you’re saying is that it’s better for a child not to experience the love of a family than to allow a homosexual couple to raise a child in a loving environment?
wow, what did your parents do to you?
also, if homosexuals cant adopt, what makes you think that they cannot get their own children? you cannot take these children away from them because it’s their right. alura mhux fejn konna bqajna? the only difference is that there is still an unhappy child in an orphanage somewhere.
Beautiful article, thank you.
Spot on!
The Roman Catholic Church still has to come to grips with the fact that it allows women within its structures, yet in secondary roles. I still cannot accept that approximately half of its members accept this situation without even a meek bleat.
[Daphne – People are Roman Catholics by choice. One assumes that if you join a religion then you accept it, and don’t join it to change it. If you want to change it, then just find another religion which suits.]
Daphne, your reasoning holds water with regards to converts, who get to choose their religion.
Being born into a religion entails a religious indoctrination that envelops an individual from birth till death with a subtle yet forceful hold over the faithful. Are you assuming that a voice of dissent from within is illogical, transfer your line of reasoning to politics and you end up with a dictatorship. In Chicago 2005 the national coalition of American nuns released pink smoke to protest against secrecy and sexism in church hierarchy.
Very few pick up their bags and leave their religion in its entirety.
[Daphne – That’s not true at all, and the evidence is all around you. Sometimes, though, people make the mistake of confusing an upbringing as a Catholic, which makes them an ‘insider’, with being a Catholic. There’s a lot of that in Malta, where people think they are Catholics because they were raised as Catholics and know a lot about Catholicism.]
The flaw in your argument is that you perceive the Roman Catholic Church in wanting the the faithful to be perfectly good Catholics, when it is only interested in volume. Yes around me there are a multitude of lapsed and pagan Catholics (I cannot stand statue worship) but the Catholic Church was built up on such superstitious souls .
You’ve got to be 25 to enter a casino, not 21.
More importantly, however, is that you’ve ventured into a subject which is very much ignored by the self-proclaimed ambassadors of Jesus and family loyal politicians of this land, especially in view of divorce legislation: the legal rights of one spouse with respect to the other.
While the 1990s’ amendments allowed for the community of acquests between spouses, it still gives place to various ambiguities. Your case regarding the purchase of a fridge on credit (till delivery) should have been regarded as “extraordinary administration” of the acquests for which the consent of both spouses is required or otherwise the agreement between the spouses and the external party can be declared void thus shedding off any obligations arising from such deal.
Strangely, however, the administration of funds held in financial institutions by spouses is considered as “ordinary administration” by law (i.e. to the same extent of buying petrol for your car or cabbages from a supermarket), This gives rise to anomalies where, for example, the husband’s bank deposits arising from his regular income are legally half-owned by the spouse, but the latter is not allowed to change the form of deposits (e.g. convert from cash equivalents to long term deposits) or merely ask about the funds held by her husband.
It is therefore no hidden secret that this may and does give rise to abuses in a single breadwinner family where the the latter can threaten his spouse not to provide her with any money for her relief.
[Daphne – Provide her with any money for her relief? That’s a funny way of putting it. But yes, you are 100% right about the rest. Over the years, 1993 amendments or not, I have known several women who live as paupers or children in their own household, having to ask for everything while the husband gets a kick out of saying ‘No. You can’t have a new dress and the children don’t need new shoes because their old ones are fine.’ I knew one woman who thought of the housekeeping money her husband gave her every month as her ‘pay’. One time, after a really bad fight, she said ‘he didn’t pay me’. Scratch beneath the surface and the situation is horrendous. It is also quite evident that the law has done a lot to change the mentality but far from enough. Bank staff are now trained rigorously to address both husband and wife in face-to-face meetings, but watching these sessions while waiting at the bank I can see that very often the husband dominates the exchange and the bank clerk allows him to engage her/his full attention, so that the wife ends up sitting there like a gooseberry. It’s the same when couples go out to make a major purchase: you can see that the sales clerks reason that the money probably comes from the man so they have to give him more attention and check out what he wants while the woman is more or less brushed aside.]
Unfortunately, many women are too busy taking care of their children to be aware of their legal rights in respect to their spouse’s money balances which are communally owned, and the right to seek redress to any abuses in this matter by obtaining a garnishee order against the husband.
And nobody gives a damn about this, either. No family-hugging politician from the House ever mentions such issues; as long as the spouses are not legally separated, we assume that their marriages are working out excellently and the Catholic Church can boast about the percentage of successful marriages.
“Provide her with any money for her relief? That’s a funny way of putting it. ”
I’ve heard a prominent lawyer referring to the women’s “pay” from the husband as ‘relief’. Whatever you may call it, it is the money which housewives normally receive monthly from their husbands for use in purchasing food items and other requirements.
The wife depends on such money for her survival, even though the large proportion of it is spent to satisfy the husband’s and children’s wants.
[Daphne – You accurately, and probably unwittingly, describe the terrible state that is your average traditional Maltese marriage.]
It’s not my marriage I’m talking about; I’m not married and I am not even a woman. I believe that this is, however, the average traditional Maltese marriage we’re talking about.
[Daphne – Yes, that’s what I said. I know you’re not a woman because you’ve given me your name.]
Precisely!
Women doing anything at all is still against the natural order of things . . . in Islamic states – but Daphne never mentions this.
On the contrary, she frequently compares Malta (unfavourably) to fundamentalist Islamic countries.
Go figure.
[Daphne – We are not an Islamic state but a European democracy and it is in that context that Malta has to be discussed and comparisons made. I never compare Malta to a fundamentalist Islamic state, because I am not given to that kind of childish hyperbole. The only thing I have said that can in any way be related to your misinterpretation of my words is this: that those Maltese people who believe Malta should have no divorce law because most Maltese are Catholic manifest the same thinking which underpins Islamic shariah law, which they, ironically, are so critical of. And that is correct.]
It’s funny how loosely the word “natural” is used. It is also a fact, for example, that even becoming a man or a woman is not natural – it is simply cultural, as what it means to be a man or a woman in Malta is different than what it means to be one elsewhere. What fascinates me is how “being a Maltese man” for many individuals involves being a homophobic individual with a loud mouth and “intimidating presence” – I wouldn’t call that natural – rather, primitive. It is very interesting that Maltese men feel that they have to preserve their masculinity actively, by publicly expressing their “disgust” towards anything “un-manly”.
Lawrence Gonzi seems to have flipping great blinkers on. Either that, or he thinks the fossilised APAN types with baggy short-sleeved shirts and blank looks are the future of the party. I was at last Sunday’s PN general council.
Speaker after speaker, most of them MPs and MEPs, they were literally pleading with him to acknowledge and accept that society has changed, and that Malta has changed, and that you cannot open the doors and windows to Europe and expect to keep out the wind (as Joe Friggieri so beautifully out it).
Then up went Gonzi to the podium, and delivered the usual over-long bore-fest of lists of social categories and the handouts that they received from his government. Not a smidgen of approval or even a token acknowledgement of the impassioned pleas of his fellow cabinet and party members.
I got a sense of a leader cut off from reality. Within his own party, mind. Has religion blinded him to this point?
What an article, thanks.
I wonder if when women are stoned in some Muslim place they also think it is ‘the order of things’and that those doing the stoning are ‘morally’ right.
Brill article. This is the sort of thing that first made me a fan of your writing in the very early 90s. As I have said a couple of times I wish that you could stick to this sort of thing where you excel.
[Daphne – Ho hum, dery. Your definition of where I excel, I think, coincides with what you agree with.]
What smart authorship! Based on critical thinking and reason!
Daphne, the trouble today is that men are conceding too much to women and letting them run the show. Perhaps someday they wake up and recognise their mistake.
Then Saudi Arabia will come to their mind.
The fact is that the Labour hamalli gave dignity and rights to women in Malta at a time when your liberal party considered women as deem fit only to look after the ‘man,’ procreate, and obey! If you don.t believe it read the Times, Berqa, Lehen Is-Sewwa, and the PN official organ…. il-Poplu . No excuses and no ifs or buts!
[Daphne – It wasn’t my ‘liberal party’ at the time. It was 20 years before I was born and none of my family voted for it. They voted for the Constitutional Party. On the other hand, unlike you (presumably) I never voted for Dom Mintoff’s horrible party, KMB’s ghastly party, Sant’s anti-EU party, and I will not be voting for Joseph Muscat’s partit tar-racanc.]
http://aaronfarrugia.com/