This is my final reply as it seems this is going nowhere. (If I did not enjoy 90% of your articles I wouldn’t be bothering which such an obstinate narrow mind where homosexuality is concerned).

[Daphne – I am one of the last people on earth who can be called narrow-minded about homosexuality, Rob. Try asking people who actually know me. In my experience, some of the most narrow-minded people are homosexual men from a certain type of background, largely because their values are, ironically, very much those of their ‘rahlija’ mothers. The real reason homosexual men from a Maltese working-class background are so very insufferable, narrow-minded and boringly ignorant is not because they are homosexual but because they are typical of their uneducated and barely civilised background. I have never cared whether a person is gay or straight (people who know me will tell you that). I don’t even care if they are a man or a woman. But if they are boring, rude, ignorant or uninformed, that’s a different matter.]

1) “there speaks somebody who has never experienced either.”

How do you know what I have experienced? Maybe I’m gay, maybe I am married, maybe I am even the famous singer called Renato (joking! Yikes!)

[Daphne – I can tell by your dreamy idealism and the way you express yourself. People with decades of experience of love, long relationships, raising a family and marriage are matter of fact in their expression and don’t speak like they’re writing the lyrics for a pop song.]

2) if you feel most marriages are not so blissful as they should be maybe you should advise people to stop filtering their mates by too many factors, especially by passport, and simply believe in “unconditional love”.

[Daphne – There you go. You are confusing physical passion and initial attraction with love again, and you fail to understand that the only unconditional love on the planet is the love of a parent for a child, and sometimes not even that. All other forms of love come with conditions very much attached, to a varying degree.]

I rest my case. (And now if you’re not afraid of challenges you will publish my reply :)

[Daphne – I have nothing to be afraid of, Rob. People who have lived much longer than you have, and who have had more varied lives, will tend to know from experience and long observation things that you will eventually discover yourself. I too was absurdly cocky at 20.]

I think this “gay love, therefore gay marriage” idea is a load of bollocks.

There, I’ve said it, and may the LGBT steamroller crush me now.

Marriage isn’t an officialisation of love. It’s a social contract. I’ve gone hoarse trying to explain how the pros and the antis have both got it spectacularly wrong. But I don’t expect any better from opinion leaders and politicians who know no history.

The social contract was created when the family unit was created. The family unit was based on procreation.

Love, if it existed at all, was incidental to the whole arrangement.

But the LGBT lobby, helped along by the stupid heterosexuals, including the Bible-thumpers, think it’s all about ‘love’. So they warble on about how wonderful it is to finally be able to marry their gay lover. As if marriage, gay or straight, does anything to love. As if love needed marriage to affirm itself.

I’ve had it up to here with the syrupy statements and the Mills & Boon logic. They say there is too much sugar in our diet. I say there is too much sugar in our thoughts. Seven spoonfuls of it in each Disney-like LGBT soundbite and each Archbishop’s riposte.

Pajjiz matur? My office-chair benumbed arse.

Really Daphne, sometimes you are great but at other times you just make me laugh out loud. So love is a choice? So you just choose to start and stop loving someone, just like that? So if you ‘chose’ to, you could just start loving, for example, Alfred Sant or Erin Tanti? Hallina Daphne.

[Daphne – You are being deliberately obtuse. I did not mean that you can just decide to love somebody or not to love them, but that everybody deploys a massive system of conscious and unconscious filters when selecting a mate. It is only after those massive filters have been deployed, whether we are aware of it or not, that our mind ‘allows us’ to fall in love. The reason why Roman Abramovitch hasn’t fallen in love with a short, fat, ugly, alcoholic tramp is not because he hasn’t yet met the right one. Would women be more likely to fall in love with Roman Abramovitch if he was an office clerk, even if he looked exactly the same? No. Less likely, then? Yes. When a single white woman walks into a party, who does she size up first – the black men, the Caucasian men, or the Asian men? The Causasian men, even if she claims otherwise. Black women will size up the black men first. Asian men will size up the Asian women. There are exceptions, but they’re the ones who prove the rule.

The other hole in your argument is that not everyone who falls in love finds it imperative or even wise to marry, and most people think it insane to marry within just a few months of meeting somebody or falling in love with them. In other words, straight people don’t marry for reasons of bare expediency, i.e. simply so that the person they ‘love’ can live in Malta. For all but the tiniest minority of heterosexual people, marriage is not a way of acquiring a passport or visa. it is a life plan.]

You found your husband from a pool of say 40000 unmarried men in Malta at the time of your dating. A gay guy would have a pool of maybe 4000 gay men to choose from. Now presuming the gay guy doesn’t date all of them (which is impossible) as much as you did not date 40000 men, but the figures show how difficult it is for a gay guy to find his match in Malta. How dare anyone force him to choose his mate by passport….true love and a real working marriage can truly be BLISSFULL.

[Daphne – Compare like with like. Young heterosexuals mate (I use the word in its pure biological meaning). Young homosexuals don’t. The criteria used by young heterosexuals for finding a mate are ENTIRELY different to those used by young homosexuals for finding somebody to pair up with. Not only is it extremely difficult for heterosexuals to find a lasting mate, as the large number of failed marriages attests, but the consequences of failure are catastrophic because the purpose of mating is to build a family unit, which then collapses. You can in no way compare this to same-sex marriage for the purpose of ‘rights’. ‘True love and a real working marriage can be truly blissful’ – there speaks somebody who has never experienced either.]

Haha I must admit you made me laugh. My first reaction was “oh know she really doesn’t get it” and “I’m gonna give up” with your argument that gay people don’t need to get married and people take too many things for granted etc.. But then your “filter” explanation was really amusing. No sarcasm intended. I have a couple friends who are also very pragmatic about choosing their mate. They may not say exactly that Love is a “choice” but they would turn their back on any nice “bait” (dare I use that word) if the passport is wrong. Then there are those ‘sad’ souls who left Malta to live with their mate in a country that treats gays and straights as complete equals in every way. You have to be in their shoes to really know the feeling of freedom and value and respect which is so exhilarating in a country that is open minded. I do not think you will completely understand this as well as a gay person will. I must also point out that it is really unfair and ignorant to assume that those festive gays in the parliament square are a good example of gay people in general. It is like saying that the religious extremists at the birgu feast who shout private ‘poems’ to statues in a crazy mantra-like manner are emblematic of the Maltese people.

[Daphne – If you’re the sort of person who thinks that marriage is there to allow you to keep your ‘nice bait’ in the country with you, you really have a lot of growing up to do, and you also give weight to the arguments of those who say that same-sex marriage debases marriage itself. The exhilarating feeling of freedom you describe has nothing to do with acceptance of homosexuality; it is what everybody who grew up in a highly invasive small society experiences as truly novel when living in a big place where nobody knows him, his parents and his extended family. Believe me when I tell you that even Maltese heterosexuals feel that way.]

I have been in a monogamous relationship for almost 32 years, and yes had we, when me and my partner were younger, had the opportunity to adopt children as a couple we would have done so.

Being gay is not all about being effeminate, flamboyant, limp-wristed, have a swishy walk and talk with a lisp like most of the gay men at St George’s Square on Monday.

Sexual orientation towards members of one’s own sex does not relate to what is to be necessarily masculine, or feminine behaviour, such as dressing, speaking or gesturing like a member of the opposite sex like sissies for men and butch dykes for women. Although, stereotypes do exist of course.

God forbid if I were to be represented by someone like Natius and the like. The same can be said for the gay pride parades held in most capital cities around the world, which make my face go red every time I watch any of them on the news.

If Alfred Kinsey’s theory is anything to go by, the Maltese lesbian and gay population should be around the 40,000 mark. Last Monday not all attending the party were gay or lesbian even though quite a few who were gay, unfortunately are somewhat involved in the local media and they do not give a very good image to the Maltese gay population.

There is no such thing as two mothers or two fathers, but there can be two parents. It also provides for security, to have two people in the care of a child. We forget how many children are in the care of aunts, nannas, institutions, that not all have fathers and mothers and many grow up without one or the other – and turn out fine in the end, even though things are not perfect. And some don’t turn out fine, because life is not fair and not everyone will have a dad, mum and a white picket fence. So my point here is, no, children don’t have a right to a mother and a father. If they don’t exist, they just don’t exist, and you cannot wave a magic wand over your ‘bill of rights for natural parents’ and have them magically appear before you – as so many children in homes know.

Even though there are many (family replacement) arrangements in place, including those sad institutions that everyone praises ‘ghax ghandhom anki psikologi u social workers, taaaa!’, where religious indoctrination is probably the order of the day, and even though we make the perfect uncles and aunts because we have time and money on our hands and like children (well…not all do…I find them annoying and useless, except for paying taxes in future and paying my pension), many people just cannot bring it upon ourselves to imagine a boy being brought up by two men or two women, because secretly they despise gays and don’t want the children to become gay, too. That’s what it’s all about. I have no doubt that the last thing a gay couple would want to do is impose an orientation on them or to infuence them. They themselves know what it’s like to grow up in an environment where their orientation is alien and where a different orientation is expected (and maybe even encouraged and forced), and wouldn’t wish it on their child.

Nobody needs two fathers, you say. And yet, there are sooooo many children in need of homes in the world, and I know some gay men – couples – who would make excellent fathers and role models for their adopted children. Yes, there are men who would have loved to have children of their own and raise them, it’s not just a maternal instinct to have children. They want to pass on their love of adventure, travel, the outdoors, and life, and not necessarily by dressing them up in drag, introducing them to Eurovision and telling them that women are jaq. The idea that men who want children are effeminate-type gays or that this is not a characteristic of a man is wrong. The days of men ‘spreading their genes and running off’ are long gone.

What children need are good, honest people to care for them, no matter what their sex, orientation, religion or skin colour may be. Evidence supports this.

What they also need is a society of straight people that doesn’t bully, humiliate and treat the child differently because their parents are gay. Maybe this was Simon Busuttil’s point that ‘society isn’t ready’.

However, it is most unfair for straight people to deny a child the possibility of finding a loving home on the grounds that other straight people are not ready for this, and that they might upset the child with their actions because…THEY are not ready for this.

http://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2010/07/beige-taupe-and-navy-blue-for-maltas-gay-pride-parade/

In this blog entry you bemoaned how boring and dull those attending the pride parade were, and how this is probably an effort to show everyone that, look, I could be you!

Now that gay people have thrown a celebration in palace square, they are their own worst enemies, just because of the way they physically look or by the way they are dressed – which to me seemed just as cheerful as, say, a NYE celebration in Germany, when people actually celebrate and act silly, wear hats, possibly wigs and light fireworks in their back garden.

Whatever we do, we are criticised – even though we do not seek to control or criticise others – which is precisely because we know what it feels like.

Just out of curiosity though, what is your opinion of two women adopting a child? You seem to focus on men but ignore female couples.

[Daphne – I wrote about it a few days ago: two mothers are a damn sight better than none. Nobody needs two fathers. Everybody needs at least one mother. The argument that some mothers are hopeless and neglectful and that some are actually dangerous is a non sequitur. People with bad mothers need mothers too: the fact that they have to cope or have had to cope with a lousy one does not mean that others can get by with none and survive intact. In fact, they can’t.]

I certainly understand marriage Daphne. I highlighted the “mundane” benefits of marriage because they are stuff people like you take for granted but which gay people could not.

[Daphne – That’s my point exactly. Those who aren’t married assume that marriage is a blissful state in which everything can be taken for granted, unlike living together without being married. In fact, those who take anything for granted are doomed.]

Imagine Daphne that you are unable to live for more than three months with your lover because he has to leave the country as a tourist or else pretend to be studying English in Malta. You will argue that these are an absolute minority of cases. But is not equality to minorities what this is all about? Please answer.

[Daphne – Love, regardless of what some people will say, is a choice. People like to deny it, but we all use filters when choosing a mate: wrong social background, wrong educational background, nothing in common, no common language, no shared sense of humour, too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, too damned ugly, hate the hair, hate the dress sense, wrong culture, wrong religion, wrong ethnic type face. Add another filter: wrong passport. Most people do it automatically. It’s not absolutely essential to scrape the bottom of the barrel when looking for a mate. Bear in mind that Romeo and Juliet were 14 or 15. Ten years later on and they’d have said, ‘Screw this’ and found somebody more suitable.]

Yes, I wrote a comment in support of the vast majority of homosexuals above. If heterosexuals were represented by a mad bunch like this and indeed became the symbol of heterosexuality, I too would be embarrassed to say I was heterosexual.

Farrugia, is it possible that this whole same-sex marriage hype, at a time when marriage between opposite-sex couple is decreasing, is more about a sense of destroy what you cannot have yourself? Is this a case of getting the monotheist religions back for past wrongs?

The way I see it is that, seeing as a same-sex couple is incapable of having children which carry the DNA of both partners, effectively this is just a case of dangerous social engineering to the detriment of the child, who, of course, will not have a link to one whole side of her genealogy.