Capitalism has keeled over before our eyes. America is poised for its first-ever black President. Over 100 million marched this week to end world poverty. And in Malta, we are still arguing over whether to introduce divorce. RAPHAEL VASSALLO analyses why we lag so far behind the rest of the world when it comes to civil liberties

There is something in the air. An uncertain sensation that “something big” might be about to happen. A pervasive feeling that the present political and economic models are no longer valid for the immediate future; that the anti-globalisation movement may have had a point when it ran riot in Genoa in 2001; that the monster that arose in the wake of Communism was too greedy, too near-sighted, and above all too badly mismanaged to last for long.
Like a distant echo of 1968, this is all fertile ground for social revolution. This week, a scarcely credible 106 million people gathered simultaneously in cities across the world, in a global manifestation against poverty. The demonstration’s organisers had hoped to attract 67 million, or 1% of the world’s population. In the end, the turnout was almost double: a fact that was quickly attributed to global discontent at the current financial crisis.
And in the United States, Illinois Senator Barack Obama is currently campaigning to become that country’s first Afro-American President: an eventuality which was considered almost the stuff of science-fiction until just a few months ago. And yet, Obama beat none other than Hillary Clinton – the first-ever female Presidential candidate – for the Democrat nomination; and if he wins against Republican John McCain on November 4, his skin colour promises to be the least of the changes that lie ahead.
Described as a “transformational figure” by former Defence Secretary Colin Powell, Obama routinely ends each campaign speech with the same line: “We’re going to win the election, and we’re going to change the world...”
Seeing big? Possibly. But it’s been 40 years since any politician even dreamed of suggesting that the world can, in fact, be changed; still less assume that the change will necessarily be for the better.

Malta isolated
Well, so much for the rest of world. As tends to be the case in such matters, Malta has pre-emptively opted out of any such enthusiasm. Politicians here do not talk about “changing the world”; on the contrary, they tend overwhelmingly to talk about shielding Malta from the effects of any changes being felt elsewhere.
Ironically, this was also the major driving force behind Malta’s negotiations to join the European Union before 2004. With our insistence on a useless abortion protocol, and our incessant demands for exemptions and transitional periods, it seems the declared aim was simply to plug into the Union’s funds, without taking on board any of the social and cultural changes implicit in accession.
And with the Malta Labour Party doggedly resisting EU membership at all costs, and for much the same reasons – arguing, among other things, that Malta would not be able to withstand “the wave of industrial change” – it seems both sides of the political spectrum are motivated primarily by a desire to keep Malta as unconnected as possible from the big, bad, wicked world.
Not, it must be said, without valid reason. In some respects, our national tendency towards arch-conservatism has already paid dividends: for instance, we have been spared the sub-prime mortgage crisis that precipitated the current global recession... largely because our traditionally cautious financial institutions kept their handbrakes up, at a time when world banks were going into lending overdrive.
But the question remains: in our so-called globalised environment, is it realistic – or even desirable – to isolate ourselves from the changes that define our generation?
And when one considers that the great ideological battle of our time happens to centre on the introduction of divorce – a reality in Europe since the 16th Century, and which is now considered an inalienable civil right in all but two countries in the world – we can only ask ourselves if ours is really a modern democracy, or a country still struggling to emerge from the Middle Ages.

Online revolution
Or can we? In recent times – and for all the public expressions to the contrary – several social indicators seem to suggest that the Maltese people might be cutting their political and religious apron strings, and striking out for pastures more liberal.
Recent surveys in this newspaper, and on television programmes such as Xarabank, reveal that the demand for divorce legislation is steadily growing, not diminishing; that tolerance of alternative lifestyles is on the increase; and that a remarkable 84% would prefer local children to be taught about contraception at school.
As is perhaps to be expected, the Internet has proved to be a major catalyst for this gradual transformation.
Godfrey Vella, a self-proclaimed secular humanist, recently founded a Facebook group called the “Maltese Humanist Movement”: modelled on its British counterpart, which seeks to propagate a world view centred not on any single religious belief, but rather on our collective experience as human beings.
“I think it is important for people to step out and say this is what we believe – this is the life-stance that we subscribe to,” he says with regard to his (admittedly tiny) online group. “I think that the example of individuals stating that yes, society should address its challenges without resorting to Granddaddy in the sky; and yes, there are valid moral codes that do not have religious beliefs as their basis; and yes, we are one common humanity with all that that implies – all this, I think, can and will play an important part in moving towards a more humane and fair society.”
Whether motivated by humanism or some other ideology, there have been other online expressions of secularism of late – including similar Facebook groups dedicated to the demand for the introduction divorce, or for issues such as abortion to no longer be used for the purposes of political blackmail.
But while Malta’s burgeoning online community enjoys a newfound freedom of expression, there is simply no equivalent paradigm shift on the part of our representatives in Parliament. On the contrary: politicians in this country appear to be growing more regressive even as the budding liberal movement grows.

Divorce doomed
Just as Malta seems to exist in splendid isolation from the buffeting forces of the world, so too are its politicians apparently oblivious to any social changes among the electorate they are supposed to represent. In some cases, they are even immune to their own party’s declared stand on individual issues.
Joseph Muscat, the Malta Labour Party’s self-styled “progressive” leader, recently declared his intention to present a private member’s bill on divorce if elected Prime Minister. MaltaToday afterwards conducted an in-house survey among MPs, and it turned out that at least six of Muscat’s own colleagues on the Opposition benches would vote against the motion.
These are Silvio Parnis, Joe Debono Grech, Adrian Vassallo, Justyne Caruana Marlene Pullicino and Anton Agius Decelis, and all cited private religious beliefs as the reason to vote against their own party’s proposal. Agius Decelis even extended his moral indignation to suggestive billboards featuring scantily clad women, arguing that the sight of a woman in a bikini was somehow offensive to public morals. (Which makes one wonder: where does Agius De Celis spend his summer? Or is it just photographs of women that raise his moral outrage...?)
Over to the other side of the House, and it transpires that not a single government MP would vote in favour of divorce if the motion were presented. Echoing an article written by Archbishop Paul Cremona in The Times some weeks earlier, parliamentary secretary Jason Azzopardi led the chorus of what is likely to become the official Nationalist objection to this issue: “I would vote for actions that sustain, strengthen and enhance the stability of the Maltese family,” he said. “Since I do not believe that a divorce law reaches such aims, (if anything, it actually runs counter to this) I would vote against.”
Azzopardi failed to specify what measures, if any, Parliament can possibly take to “strengthen the stability of the Maltese family”. Nor is it particularly clear what effect any such legislation will have on persons whose marriage has already broken down, and who are forced into a state of cohabitation against their will.
Recent statistics suggest that these latter are a good deal more numerous than previously believed. The rate of marriage failure now stands at a scarcely credible one in two: as confirmed by Discern, the Church’s institute for ‘research into the signs of the times’, which recently concluded that “approximately over the last decade for every two marriages being registered there is one application to seek separation [23,674 marriages against 10,593 separation applications: 44.7%].
“The situation appears to be worsening, since during the 1996-2000 period the proportion was 40.1% [12,114 marriages vs 4,862 separations]; the figure for the period 2001-2005 has risen to 49.6% [11,560 marriages vs 5,731 separations].”
From this perspective, the Government’s blanket “no” to divorce appears motivated less by rigid Catholic principles, than by an apparent failure to take on board the social changes which have occurred in the past decade.
Ironically, the same cannot be said for the Catholic Church itself, which commissioned the above report and has repeatedly stressed the need to take stock of the changing social climes. So in a sense, it seems that Malta’s entire political class has shielded itself not only from the reality on the streets, but also from the same institution that supposedly inspires its values to begin with.

‘Half-way secular’
All of this suggests a widening gulf between parliamentarians and their own constituents; and this itself is a source of consternation for the secularists in our midst.
Godfrey Vella reasons that Malta is still “at a half-way stage between a theocracy and a secular state.”
“Separation of church and state at its most basic should ensure that there are no priests in parliament, and that the Church does not get involved in making laws that regulate civil society,” he says.
“I would maintain that even if we do not have religious institutions formally represented in parliament, the fact that we have parliamentarians who state that they will legislate on the basis of their religious beliefs makes these parliamentarians proxies for the religious authorities.”
Reacting to the above objections to divorce from Malta’s supposedly leftwing politicians, Vella argues that religious beliefs alone are not a sufficient reason to deny rights to others.
“Do I mean to say that people shouldn’t personally believe that divorce is wrong because they believe that this is what God states? No. This isn’t an argument about what individuals should themselves believe. Rather, this is an argument about what grounds may be legitimately used to coerce other citizens to act in a certain way and abide by certain rules.”
Like Prof. Kenneth Wain, who argued in an interview with MaltaToday that “the way forward should be a sensible, reasonable debate based on dialogue and the exchange of ideas,” Godfrey Vella and likeminded secularists believe that legislation, which affects all citizens equally, cannot derive its raison d’être from any one belief system.
“I am more than willing to listen to and argue with anybody who claims that he has arguments to support the view that divorce causes harm to society,” he claims. “I am not ready to give any time to anybody who states that he is against divorce because some supernatural being has instructed him to be so...”

Change? No thanks
In the final analysis, however, the divorce debate has less to do with rational discussion along the lines proposed by either Wain or Vella, and more with a perceived national resistance to change.
This might explain the scaremongering tone of Archbishop Caruana’s recent sermon on September 8, in which secularism was unaccountably shot down as a “value-free” ideology, and divorce itself was causally linked to abortion and euthanasia... two topics which remain little understood, in a country which prefers reducing complex issues to simple soundbites... and even then, for the express purpose of orchestrating public hostility, aimed not only at the issues themselves, but also the individuals propagating them.
So while Senator Barack Obama builds his electoral campaign on “change we can believe in”, here in Malta the battlecry appears to be the very opposite. We are urged to vote for political parties on the strength of their ability to resist change; to preserve culture and tradition; and above all, to defend our “values”.
The trouble is, these “values” are becoming increasingly harder to discern, let alone define. Which once again raises the question first asked by arch-secularist Carl Sagan, when he wrote: “what, exactly, are conservatives trying to conserve?”

rvassallo@mediatoday.com.mt

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