Oh do stop it, Martin Scicluna
I don’t know about you, but I really think it’s time Times of Malta columnist and former government consultant Martin Scicluna got a strong grip on himself. It’s one thing to have prejudices and biases – most people do – but it’s another thing altogether when you allow those prejudices and biases to overwhelm your rational brain and pervert your analysis of incontrovertible facts.
Scicluna emigrated from Malta the year I was born, 1964, and did not live here again until it was safe to do so in the late 1990s. That might have some bearing on why he thinks the ‘left’ was so wonderful for Malta, when the opposite was true.
He very stupidly holds up the decriminalization of sodomy (which he calls the decriminalization of homosexuality, when he should know much better than that, and which had long been a dead letter anyway), the decriminalization of adultery (already a dead letter for generations) and legislation for civil marriage (but not for divorce, and yet he doesn’t ask why not) by Mintoff’s government in the 1970s as paragons of progress for Malta.
Scicluna doesn’t bother to do the sensible and intelligent thing and weigh the decriminalization of sodomy, a law that had not been used for generations as the armies of male prostitutes who lined the Grand Harbour should have told him, against the huge destruction Mintoff’s government wrought on Malta, its economy and the freedom of its people.
What price the decriminalization of sodomy when your supporters are burning down a newspaper people and Opposition party clubs on your encouragement and without fear of being apprehended or prosecuted?
Martin Scicluna’s definition of human freedoms and progress is probably very different to mine, and also very peculiar indeed, because I place freedom of expression and of association, and the right to live without constant fear of violent attack because of one’s views, way, way above a stupid dead-letter law which was not there to prosecute homosexual men but to allow for ‘kwereli’ on sodomy, generally by wives against their husbands in a completely different age and time.
Funny how Scicluna praises Mintoff’s ‘left’ for the ‘reforms’ he picks and chooses but then has nothing to say about the terrible way in which we lived, too scared to speak our views, the building that housed the newspaper for which he writes being burned down, people being set upon for protesting and for expressing their objections to government policy, ordinary women attacked by police and thugs for demonstrating against water cuts – I won’t go on. Scicluna is way too insufferable and egocentric in his observations.
He writes:
The Maltese Church has understandably been in the vanguard since each step forward has leached more power from its grasp. But it has also been supported by Maltese of a certain age, class and politics who have feared change instead of welcoming social improvement.
In passing, it is interesting that the changes of the last 50 years have been led, to their absolute credit, by the radical parties of the left: the Labour Party and Alternattiva.
Incredible. I don’t wish to be insulting, but I think that when one turns 80, it is time to set down one’s pen. If you are not going to be accused of senility or extreme selective memory, you will be accused of stupidity – an accusation some of Scicluna’s former classmates have long levelled at him anyway.
What changes have Alternattiva led? They have never been in government, or even had a seat in parliament except for that brief period when Wenzu Mintoff, then a member of parliament, switched his ticket from Labour to AD.
The main changes for social progress – the real ones, which truly mean something, rather than fiddling about with dead-letter laws while wrecking the economy and causing people to live in fear and misery – have come from the Nationalist Party. What is EU membership and the legislative, social and economic changes that had to be made in preparation for it, if not the most massive social progress?
Malta is unrecognizable now to what it was under Mintoff precisely because of the Nationalist Party’s changes and policies, precisely because of EU membership.
Martin Scicluna praises the ‘left’ for its mammoth strides in reforming Malta by scrapping a couple of dead-letter laws on sodomy and adultery and conveniently ignores the fact that his beloved ‘left’, most notably led by the prime minister he voted into power last year, fought tooth and claw to stop Malta becoming a member of the European Union. AD, on the other hand, supported the Nationalist government in that.
So how’s that for progressive thinking and social progress?
Perhaps now they could set about burning a few newspaper buildings to help their supporters feel right at home. They’ve been gagging burn down this website for years – they just can’t work out how yet. And when they do, perhaps Martin Scicluna will come out praising them for their progressive thinking.
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Mr. Scicluna can’t see the wood for the trees.
Full marks alla faccia di questo zimbello. This man is always ready to bash the Catholic Church because he’s still stuck at the point where he left Malta in 1964, and to bash the PN which in government appointed him (against better advice) as the prime minister’s adviser on security matters.
I am well over 80, and it is not my intention to put my “pen” down.
[Daphne – That was just a bit of sarcasm, Mr Saliba. It was my 97-year-old grandmother who patiently worked out the numbers for me when I fretted, immediately after the 2013 referendum on EU membership, that there was still the general election to be got through. By the accounts of his contemporaries, Mr Scicluna wasn’t much sharper 60 years ago than he is today, but whereas one would normally hesitate to be rude, in this case and at this stage, I have to make an exception because he has really gone too far with his deceitful propaganda about the progressive liberality of a political party whose spell in government was marked by extreme fear, corruption and oppression.]
As for Martin Scicluna I do not think that it is age which casts doubt on the merits of his opinions, but, as you point out, a complete absence, in body and spirit, from the Malta under Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici in which we have lived.
It is also clouded by an obvious allergy to the moral influence of the Catholic Church in Malta and a perceived opinion that progress can only be measured in terms of distancing oneself, if not aggressively campaigning against, its influence.
It makes me wonder what his concept of freedom is. Is it only meaningful when it refers to freedom from any restraint on sexual expression?
[Daphne – I too find his anti-Catholic obsession really tedious. It is so very teenage. Most stable people grow out of that kind of thing by the time they’re out of their 20s and have learned the value of religious freedom and religious tolerance. Martin Scicluna defines himself as a liberal and then manifests extreme intolerance towards anything Catholic. I am not a practicising Catholic myself but respect the wish of others to be practicing Catholics and to see their values shared by as many people as possible. I may find some of them extremely annoying, but I am not about to start a campaign against them.]
Does Mr. Scicluna know that the so called workers’ party handed a paper, in which the persons concerned would pledge their word not to follow the Malta Union of Teachers/Movement of United Teachers directive or they would be locked out of the schools in which they taught?
The teachers stood up to Mr Scicluna’s political hero, and were locked out.
If the teachers had not been real “suldati ta’ l-azzar” the trade union movement would have been annihilated.
In all that turmoil the solidarity shown to us teachers, members and non-members of the MUT, by the Medical Association of Malta (MAM) – especially – and by the business community in general, was overwhelming.
Mr. Scicluna, through this money – and other actions (doctors giving their services for free to teachers who were locked out) we stuck it out for 13 weeks.
Even after all these years I will say thank you again to those who stood with us in those hard times. And I am still very proud to have done what I did and would do the same again with no qualms.
Martin Scicluna should stop fidgeting in Maltese affairs, because even we Labour supporters have had enough of his lamentations. Good riddance.
Very often, the word “progress” is taken to mean “change”, wether that is for the better or for the worse.
Daphne’s article continues to confirm what I had experienced with Martin Scicluna for a number of years. He is above all authoritarian and not authoritative. He expects that everyone around him should simply follow his orders and work according to his instructions (as his former employees will confirm).
He believes that he’s more British than the Queen, and he looks down on Maltese and the Maltese unless they agree with him.
There is no space for dissent or alternatives when he conducts meetings. His manner, his countenance and his elitist approach to the people around him reflect what kind of person he is. He uses politeness and courtesy as a form of rudeness and insult.
The bottom line is that he thinks he is worth much more than he actually is.
How true this comment is – I experienced Martin Scicluna’s authoritarian way of doing things when I worked for a company that took him on as a consultant, when he first returned to Malta in the 90s.
Suffice to say, he did not last long.
Yes. From headhunted to whatever the antonym of headhunted is.
The 1973 law enacted by Malta’s Labour government legalised sexual relations between two consenting adults of the same sex. This legislation was no different from the UK’s 1967 Sexual Offences Act enacted by the UK’s Labour government, except for the age of consent.
In Malta the age of consent was set at 18, equal to that for heterosexual sex. In the UK it was set at 21 for homosexuals and was only equalised with that for heterosexuals (16) by Tony Blair’s Labour government many decades later (in the face of staunch opposition from people of your mentality).
[Daphne – People of my mentality? If you were a regular reader or even somebody who knows me personally at all, you would know that I don’t give a flying monkey’s whether two men or two women (or for that matter, 10 men and/or women of all assorted stripes) choose to have sex with each other. I consider it none of my business unless they are politicians or people in official positions, and not the law’s business, and more importantly still, I find other people’s sex lives and their obsession with them ever so distinctly sad and pathetic and not at all galvanizing. Also, I do not come from a tar-rahal, tal-Muzew family and so I did not grow up thinking that homosexuals are alien species or that they will burn in hell after suffering the wrath of God, so I have always taken homosexuality for granted as a fact of life. I trust you are now fully apprised of ‘my mentality’.]
These two pieces of legislation nullified sodomy laws that were intended to target homosexuals. Anyone falling for your drivel that sodomy laws were intended to “protect married women” (as stated in the aforementioned previous article) should refer to the homophobic statements by opponents of decriminalisation at the time (prominent PN politicians and the clergy), or simply look up “sodomy law” on Wikipedia.
[Daphne – Oh, Wikipedia, that fount of all knowledge. You should know better than to try to impress by quoting it. Yes, the sodomy laws were indeed used to protect women from the depredations of husbands who used anal sex as ‘contraception’, at a time (that last until the 1990s, as it happens) when the concept of rape in marriage did not exist in law or even in society. In fact, the law on sodomy was used by women against their husbands far more often than it was used by men against men, in Malta as in England, with perhaps the most famous case of all being that of Lord Byron. Or perhaps you did not know that the reason he left England and began his long peregrinations throughout Europe because his wife confided to a maid that he used to regularly sodomise her. Your uninformed analysis (but you are not alone in this, and Martin Scicluna has made exactly the same gross error) also fails to take into account that the sodomy law was not ‘anti-homosexual’ because it did not deal in lesbians, who were free to have sex despite the illegality of sodomy. So what are you and Martin Scicluna saying here – that the anti-homosexual sodomy law discriminated between homosexual men and homosexual women? That all homosexuals are men? That men don’t sodomise women, when it was one of the most commonly practised forms of sex in less enlightened periods? I really do think you need to read something better than Wikipedia.]
Such colonial sodomy laws are still in force in unenlightened parts of the Commonwealth where homophobic violence is rife. Cyprus had to remove its sodomy law relatively recently as a condition for EU membership.
You have to be mature enough to accept that, on very rare occasions, the Labour Party can get something right (that is, if you do believe it is right for homosexuals not to be criminalised).
[Daphne – I appreciate that you the archetypal Maltese male chauvinist, but even for an archetypal Maltese male chauvinist, asserting that all homosexuals are men is going a little too far. Lesbians have been free to have sex under Maltese and British law since time immemorial. They are homosexual. Whether the Labour Party got something right or not is irrelevant. The scale of what it got wrong, which was catastrophic, obliterates the removal of a dead-letter law on sodomy. If you read something other than Wikipedia and talk to a few law historians, you will find that the last time the sodomy law was used before gallant Mintoff removed it was a century or so earlier. You sound middle-aged and even elderly to me, so you can’t have possibly missed the fact that despite that dead-letter sodomy law still being on the books, Malta in the 1960s and early 1970s was a place where male prostitution was rife, where boys sold their butts to sailors openly in Strait Street, and where rough trade hung around Grand Harbour hoping to pick up a sailor or soldier for a shilling. Do you honestly think that nobody committed adultery flagrantly and openly in Malta because there was a dead-letter law against adultery still on the statute books? Something else: I trust you know that both the adultery and sodomy laws were ‘kwerela’ based and that the police could not initiate action independently. In other words, they required a complaint from the injured party. The police did not and could not hunt down adulterous couples, gay men engaged in the sexual act, or men sodomising women.]
‘Unenlightened parts of the Commonwealth’, where’s that, Majorca?
A very good piece, Daphne, based on incontrovertible facts the interpretation and analysis of which one can argue ad infinitum. I don’t know Mr Scicluna personally except from his newspaper columns, which I very often find highly opinionated.
I have lived through all the events you mentioned and I fully concur with your evaluation of them.
I don’t consider myself a die-hard Nationalist, except in the sense that since the 1981 election I have consistently voted PN after becoming totally disaffected by Mintoff’s and the MLP’s ‘leftist’ policies and behaviour.
On balance these were definitely harmful to the country’s social and economic development.
Many Maltese migrants who never experienced the excesses of the ‘golden’ Mintoff years (also foreigners who get interested in our political landscape) very often equate the MLP with leftist parties abroad.
It is only when they are made conscious of, or directly experience, the historical facts that they realise that the MLP is no leftist party other than its populist appeal and its tendency towards centralism and totalitarian behaviour.
Martin Scicluna, having lived in England between 1964 and the late 1990s, cannot be excused from making such a misjudgment. He is/should be intelligent enough and down-to-earth in his analysis to conclude from Malta’s political history that although the PN’s record is not unblemished, its vision and policies for the country were most beneficial for a truly modern and liberal (in the European sense) development of our small nation.
Is this the same Martin Scicluna who was once Chairman of the Board of Governors of St Edward’s College?
[Daphne – Yes.]
Dawn it-tip ta’ nies jissejhu laghqin.
He is as predictable as a weather-vane during a hurricane.
I cannot understand all the hullabaloo. As far as I understand being sodomized and being homosexual (I still prefer the old meaning of gay and dislike the modern connotation) are two completely different arguments.
Your reply did not address the central point of my comment, which was that the 1973 Malta law, just like the UK’s 1967 Sexual Offences Act, legalised sex between consenting adults of the same gender thereby preventing the use of sodomy laws to persecute gay people.
[Daphne – Why enact a law to specify that something is legal when it wasn’t illegal before? That is the central point of my argument: it was never illegal to be homosexual. It was only ever illegal to sodomise somebody, but then again, only if the sodomised person filed a complaint with the police. Lesbians have always been free to roll around in the hay, anyway, so there was no need of a law to say that. Mintoff might as well have enacted a law to say that women are free to drive cars. Oh, and incidentally, speaking of women – the point you and Martin Scicluna miss in your Liberal Mintoff Admiration Society is that he never did anything to give women equal status in marriage and to remove their hugely unjust and very dangerous chattel status. It was the Nationalist government which did that in the early 1990s. Might I remind you and Martin Scicluna that sodomy regardless, homosexual men had more rights under the law than married women did, by virtue of their gender, and that bloody Mintoff did nothing to change that, perhaps because he was so very abusive towards his own long-suffering wife (which is, incidentally, just another indicator of how he was anything but progressive, liberal and open-minded).]
Your response continues to show how uninformed you are on the matter – Wikipedia is indeed a good starting point in your case (which is why I suggested it in the first place).
[Daphne – Burgensis (wasn’t that the name of the person who wrote the horoscopes for Radju Malta in the Mintoff years?), I read archaeology at university for four years. With that level of discipline, I do not start any sort of historical research with Wikipedia.]
The fact that sodomy laws invariably ignored lesbian sex is not a sign that such laws were “not anti-homosexual” but an expression of misogyny since the male lawmakers could not perceive women having such urges (Muslim and other patriarchal societies take a similar approach).
[Daphne – Wrong again, Burgensis. Sapphism has been a known and at times even celebrated fact of life for thousands of years. The reason that law-makers did not care about sex between women is because, being exclusively men, they were literal-minded and thought in boxes. The biblical prohibition is against sodomy, so they took it literally. That’s why the law is/was against sodomy specifically in both Christian and Muslim societies, and not against homosexuality. That is why the sodomy laws were not gender specific and affected heterosexual relationships too. In any case, you can’t legislate against homosexuality because it is a state of being, like red hair. You can only legislate against a specific act.]
With regard to your facile argument that the prosecution would “require a complaint from the injured party”, you do not seem to be aware that the potential for blackmail was one of the motivating factors for legalising homosexual acts in the UK.
[Daphne – You know, it is at points like this that I am tempted to give up and let people drown in their own stupidity and ignorance. Fear of blackmail about homosexuality in Britain in the recent past had only marginally to do with fear of the police. You ignore the crucial fact that the complainant would end up as a key witness in the trial and he would have to be very motivated indeed to want to expose himself in that way. The REAL fear of blackmail, which continues to exist into the present as we have seen from a couple of high profile cases only in the past two years or so, is from being outed as homosexual. The fact that a lot of Maltese people miss is that whether a society is liberal or not, there will always be many people who prefer to keep their sexuality private, for reasons best known to themselves. British society is a typical example of that.]
It is a shame you were not around to consult the UK Government when it commissioned Lord Wolfenden to write his seminal report on homosexual offences and prostitution in the 1950’s. You could have regaled him with your “expert” opinion i.e. that such legislation was not really necessary.
[Daphne – Burgensis, 1950s Britain was a very different world. You cannot teleport yourself back in time and come back with a lorryload of anachronistic assumptions. We do not discuss the status of women today in terms of women being granted the vote in 1947.]
You are clearly out of your depth on this particular issue. It is best for everyone if you stick to your sterling journalistic work exposing the failings/excesses of the PL administration (past and present).
[Daphne – I’m sorry to have to disabuse you of the notion that I am out of my depth on this subject. It is actually one of which I have considerable knowledge. Human rights issues are indivisible. Unlike many, including yourself, I have never stuck to a narrow area of interest on the grounds of my gender, sexuality or marital status. In other words, I did not spend years fixating on the terrible status of married women under Maltese law while ignoring all other related human rights/discrimination areas. And you would do well to do the same and climb out of your narrow, one-track-minded obsession and look about you at the bigger historical picture and also current reality.]
Yes, you are homophobic, and a snob to boot – these traits come out when a political opponent happens to be homosexual and/or perceived hamallu.
[Daphne – That’s your perception because you have such a big chip on your shoulder about your sexuality and social background. Which brings me back to my original point to you – or maybe it was to somebody else in the same thread? – that the people with most hang-ups about homosexuality are homosexuals themselves raised in an oppressive tar-rahal, tal-Muzew environment. I have a feeling that was rather close to home, hence your reaction. The reality is that people from my sort of background never really gave a damn about whether somebody was homosexual or not – it was just part of life, and because that life wasn’t dominated by the parish priest, what God thought about sex between two men or two women just never entered the equation. This is something you probably find very hard to understand but you will just have to take my word for it. Also, if I were a snob I wouldn’t even bother to interact with you but would just brush you off. You’d be better off if you did not parade your prejudices and preconceived notions about people you think are from a better (different?) social background to yours, and who refuse to conform to your notion of ‘humble’ and self-effacing. Even if I were a snob, quite frankly, what is it to you? My being a snob is no more your concern than your being homosexual is mine.]
Anyone in the UK who denigrates the decriminalisation of homosexuality as “the legalisation of sodomy” is seen for what they really are.
[Daphne – Seen for what they really are by whom, Burgensis? Do be specific. Factual arguments require facts.]
In Malta however, you can get away with your protestations that you are not homophobic since anyone displaying inglizati is often mistaken for a liberal. I am afraid that, if you do not keep such traits under control, you risk giving the PN the “Nasty Party” image that the UK’s Tory Party acquired when in opposition, taking it years to shed.
[Daphne – Tsk tsk, Burgensis. Inglizati? Your prejudices are on bold display. Don’t blame me for your problems with your sexuality. Blame whoever it was who gave you a chip about ‘snobs with Inglizati’. The root of your difficulty accepting your sexuality is the same as that of your difficulty accepting people like me.]
Burgensis outlined each and every axiom of Muscat’s philosophy, or what passes for one, in his arguments.
When will these people realise Labour projects its misgivings about life, the universe and everything to create an alibi for its existence?
They will move from one argument to the next using Mintoff’s words to justify preconceptions motivating their reasoning.
Homosexuality as exclusively male, and that due misogyny, Islam and Christianity as mutually inclusive, read God is male, and finally, Inglizati.
As if one of the official languages has to be seen solely for the sham it becomes when used to hide one’s background.
Muscat opened a can of worms when he decided to dabble with gender, minority and subsequent social ‘issues’. The PN has an ideal space where to ram home his limits, ramshackle foundations upon which Labour is built and consequently, the dead end Joseph will become.
It’s utterly ridiculous but expected for exponents of his creed, Gauci Cunningham, Natius, Cyrus and the one from Australia, to take on shrill, aggressive, violent tones in the name of some unity and social pact.
Capricious at best, downright disingenuous and selfish when perceived from the outside. Because this is what has become the style for each and every individual who wishes to engage in discourse and finds himself defending Muscat’s benign politics.
Such is his liberation theology, made of suldati tal-azzar.
Burgensis, the Roman Catholic Church has a history of casual homosexuality derived from its gradual rising up the ranks of the patrician class of Rome. Somehow it adapted itself to attract those who mattered.
Which is how ‘puritan’ sectarian Christianity had come to dislike and treat sexuality in all its forms under strictly procreative utilitarian perspective in the first place.
Heterosexual lust alone is as sinful as the homosexual inherently childless act.
Both considered a determining component of hedonistic paganism, tolerant of idols, temples to every false god and enemy of a religious peace with each and every race under Rome’s patronage.
That only led to its persecution, a sect which only admitted the one god was as destabilising as the Taleban of Rome’s Pantheon.
Sexuality in the end was key to establish the faith amongst the ruling class.
Which is why the act of considering homosexuality as some oppressed minority is a sure sign of class hatred.
In extolling these perceived achievements of the Labour government of the 1971-1987 era, Mr. Scicluna fails to acknowledge or take into account the biggest single blow, to the safeguarding of those very same fundamental rights and freedoms, ever delivered by a party in government since Independence: the failure to appoint judges to the Constitutional Court, rendering it inactive for nine whole months.
In stark contrast one of the very first decisions taken by the incoming Nationalist government in 1987 was the introduction of provisions of law extending the European
Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, to become enforceable as part of the Law of Malta.
Given AD’s ideological stance, that makes him a closet Marxist, especially when he prefers grouping both to term them the ‘radical’ left.
Bit of a blemish on his illustrious career at Her Majesty’s service then; the guy’s a pacifist.
I have been reliably informed that the think-tank he used to preside over is now practically defunct because of his dogmatic attitude.
Martin Scicluna is an insufferable, pretentious peddler of bollocks.
He is the typical returned migrant who thinks that Malta and the Maltese are still stuck in a time-warp that stood still when they left. Then they come back and want to teach us how to think like the evolved beings they think they’ve become.
Yet it is he who is still stuck in the Sixties, obsessing about Mintoff and sodomy and civil marriage and the Catholic Church.
Just before the European Parliament elections he exhorted us to send a message to the government that it was getting above itself, but now that things didn’t go quite as he had thought or hoped, he revives the old Catholic Church canard.
Pathetic pseudo intellectual babble. Go and do something useful, Scicluna, like feeding the pigeons.
“…. he revives the old Catholic Church canard.”
How transparent, Mr Scicluna.
That, and your joke.
I really can’t understand how this country has so many self-appointed experts on everything, Scicluna being a typical example.
It’s probably like Daphne says: our educational system is based on regurgitating facts and not on rational thought. Hence, anybody who can construct sentences that sound good or look good is thought of highly by the vast swathes of rationality-incapable Maltese.