I cannot agree more. I am delivering a standing ovation.

However, many of us were there to celebrate all the same, just for the simple fact that the law will now recognize same-sex unions. What can we do, there was political hijack, all right, but does that mean we have to stay home and sulk instead?

[Daphne – No, it means you should have held your own party elsewhere, at home or in some other public space not associated with parliament and the prime minister, because any sensible person could and should have understood at the outset that the party was obviously going to be a partisan political mes-en-scene. What did you think the stage was for, and who did you think paid for it?]

Would it be justified to celebrate had PN passed the law? We both know they would never do that.

[Daphne – They would in fact have done so, yes, and were preparing to do so. And they would have voted on this law too had it not included the adoption clause. Adoptions are not about the rights of adults but about the rights of children. I have no objection to same-sex civil unions and a great deal of objection to adoption by same-sex couples with a birth certificate giving two women or two men as the birth parents. The two issues are entirely separate and because I agree or rather fail to object to the one, it does not follow that I have to support the other.]

Was the law passed only to score political points? Yes. Would PN or PL otherwise give a hoot about us? No.

[Daphne – Count yourself lucky. Married women in Malta had to wait for hundreds of years, until the early 1990s, for the basic rights that single women and all men, whether married or not, gay or not, took for granted as theirs. I’m sorry, but as somebody who was deprived of most of her rights and autonomy on marriage in 1985 I have absolutely no sympathy for the grand dramas and entirely disproportionate fuss made by gay men about their lack of rights, when they had every ruddy right going. Did they take to the streets bleating and screaming in feathers and amusing outfits for the recognition of equal rights for married women? No, they did not. They didn’t give a damn. Who cared? Not they. It was only when we got equal rights in marriage that they began wanting a slice of that. Before, they didn’t, in case one of them was forced into the role of ‘wife’ and made subordinate to the ‘husband’. I’m afraid, Malicia, that you have to come to terms with the fact that in Malta even the gay men are complete chauvinists and patronising towards/dismissive of women.]

As far as I am concerned – politicians here from both parties are the same – only interested in their own egos. But you were very harsh towards Neil and the whole LGBT community as a whole.

[Daphne – Actually, I wasn’t. And if Neil himself doesn’t think I was ‘harsh’, why should you?]

Why everybody else can celebrate what the hell they want, but the LGBT cannot go out and voice their joy?

[Daphne – Because they did it in the wrong place and for the wrong reasons. Do you honestly believe that the small and ramshackle gathering on Palace Square represented the gay people of Malta? It most certainly did not. Aside from the heterosexual Labour supporters bussed in for the night, the gay faces I saw there all belonged to one particular extended social group and type, to say nothing of voting tendencies. When parliament voted on the Equal Rights in Marriage law, which was far more seminal than ‘gay marriage’, we married women and all women just got on with our day, perhaps only pausing to say ‘Oh good’. There was nobody to orchestrate us into a night-time party and we wouldn’t have gone anyway. What we had endured for centuries was a real, actual, abhorrent injustice and prancing around in feathers with sparklers on Palace Square would just have served to belittle it not celebrate its end. Next time celebrate elsewhere and don’t let yourself be used.]

You made it sound like unless all existing injustices in the world are fixed, LGBT community has no right to celebrate their own small victory. This community already fights many a battle on a daily basis. Especially Neil. And many people in the community wonder what did they do do deserve such bashing. Can’t we have a breather?

[Daphne – Don’t test my patience, Malicia. Most straight people already think of gay people as being so far up their own backsides that they can’t see daylight. There is no need to give them more ammunition. Gay people do not have any battles to fight on a daily basis. They have all the rights at law that straight people do. Until the early 1990s, gay men (whether married or unmarried) and single women (whether gay or straight) had more rights than I did as a married woman. Gay men are not even stigmatised in Malta – they are literally all over the place on every media channel, the new icons and role models for working-class Malta, trailing hordes of housewife admirers. They have, in fact, taken over from priests in that regard – as ‘safe’ men for married women to become infatuated with.]

Completely agree. I know many black Americans (and black Canadians) who wouldm’t set a foot here.

Labour MP Joe Sammut wanted African migrants to be excluded from boarding the public transport buses on the Zurrieq route.

Regarding my comment about Ms Calleja, I happen to have known her back in the day when she was still doing some soul-searching. She lately wrote on The Times about how she has a well-nurtured sense of justice and differentiating between right and wrong, replying to someone who also knew her then and may or may not have referred to her in his commentary on the gay marriage-adoption nexus.

That’s why it strikes me as hypocritical that someone like her come out and say these things publicly when the only ‘right and wrong’ she sees around her is in relation to one facet of her life, her sexual orientation.

In my experience gay rights have always been easier or more palatable to talk about and discuss than racism. I am glad about the legislation of civil unions, but in the States for example many gay activists often point out how it is white men who are the most popular leaders of the movement and barely leave room for intersectionality.

I agree that hands down in Malta it is the African immigrants who are the most powerless in society, and due to how homogeneous Maltese society is (mostly because of Maltese people refusing to integrate or socialise with black people, rather than the other way around as so many like to claim) most people continue to, willingly or unconsciously, ignore the problem and focus on issues that are more popular at the moment.

We are a self interested society who places priority on those issues that affect us first and foremost and unfortunately that ‘us’ does not include Africans in the minds of most Maltese.

Dr Falzon has been working tirelessly for minority rights in Malta – gay rights and migrant rights in particular – for years. His commitment to the two is beyond question, and when, last July, Joseph Muscat threatened to push back migrants to Libya Aditus resigned from the LGBTI consultative council – a clear sign, if anything, that it was not going to be hegemonised by an institution which breached fundamental rights.

That you choose to demonise this man is pitiful.

[Daphne – Pull out a dictionary and look up ‘demonise’ and ‘attack’. Then sit down and use your mind. I’m assuming even somebody who calls himself Il-Hmar has one. It is precisely because I find Muscat’s behaviour towards African immigrants so very shocking – the case you mention being but one – that I will never, and I mean never, collude in the public myth he is trying to build of himself as somebody liberal or decent. That’s what Neil Falzon did: he colluded in helping to build a positive image for Muscat on the matter of human rights, when the reality is otherwise, as he knows better than most. Also, Falzon strikes me as not at all the sort of person who would consider my words as an ‘attack’ or ‘demonisation’ and who probably also gets the point. Sometimes, when you rush to defend somebody, as you have done, you can go too far and embarrass them instead.]