Mullahs in our midst

The divorce debate is getting bogged down in technicalities and unsubstantiated lies on alimony and purported ‘studies’ of the effects of divorce and marital breakdown on children.

Divorce: it will (i) broaden the grounds of what we currently call ‘civil annulment’, and (ii) allow remarriage. It’s brought with it a deluge of spurious claims of how children will fall victim to a new wave of marital discord – a discord that it is already happening as we speak.

Don’t be fooled. Zwieg bla Divorzju is led by a cabal of religious social conservatives, friends of the Gonzi family and laymen held in high regard by the Maltese church (which provided its PRO Kevin Papagiorcopulo to assist them). Behind the rhetoric of people like Andre Camilleri and Arthur Galea Salomone, lies their conservative and right-wing vision of your place in society. And it’s a line of thought that comes straight from Castille and the Maltese curia.

Camilleri and Galea Salomone’s success comes from their fruitful careers in financial and legal services, and of course their political connections – nothing irregular, it just means they are trusted by the Nationalist government.

Their vision of society is based on their Catholic activism and the socially conservative worlds they inhabit. They believe in a social order that does not upset the supreme power the Catholic church enjoys over our civil courts (Malta is the only country where a civil divorce is not required before applying for an ecclesiastical annulment). They are unfazed about the fact that the rich who afford a foreign domicile can get their divorces rubber-stamped in Malta - because the rich have a right to spend their money any way they like; the rest should not have to spend it on lawyers in separation cases.

Camilleri was a president of the forum for Maltese Catholic organisations. Like Stock Exchange chairman Arthur Galea Salomone, before becoming CEO and later deputy chairman of the MFSA, Camilleri was a director of the Maltese church’s bank APS. The greater part of their careers has been spent inside boardrooms and at the helm of government corporations.

They are the leaders in the Maltese world of finance and friends of the anti-divorce prime minister. Eddie Fenech Adami wanted Camilleri to be judge in 2002, but he was turned down by the Commission for the Administration of Justice for not having been a practising lawyer for a minimum of 12 years – ironically by the hand of the very government that favoured his expertise at the MDC and later as chairman of Malta International Airport during the 1990s.

It takes no genius to understand that Camilleri and Galea Salomone are totally displaced from the realities of domestic violence and the vicissitudes of cash-strapped men and women who pursue protracted and expensive litigations inside the family courts and the ecclesiastical tribunals. Their personal balance sheets have been debited with hard work and Catholic temperance, and they expect you and everyone else to do the same.

But life just so happens not to be as boringly simple as the audited financial statements that turn them on.

Look behind the men who are opposing divorce. Camilleri’s wife Sonia is a prime exemplar of the conservative mindset that dominates the Nationalist government. She was Children’s Commissioner when she told the parliamentary social affairs committee of her opposition towards contraception and IVF.

Her hostility towards IVF (and in turn IVF babies) led her to claim that children born by artificial reproduction had a higher risk of developing cancer. As a committed Catholic, she expects infertile couples to turn to prayer instead of choosing to spend their money as they wish because “IVF is a big industry that convinces couples it’s the only way they can have a baby” (this conspiratorial footnote was rich coming from the wife of someone who has earned his living serving oil firm Aramco, aviation, and banking).

Even worse, Camilleri – the lucky mother of four – believes that once a woman tries all natural methods and still fails to conceive, she should accept the fact that that she could not have children. There, 'someone' has made your bed for you, now you will lie in it.

Fast-forward to 2011, and her husband Andre Camilleri (and likewise Galea Salomone) claims that battered women should not have the right to divorce their abusive husbands because this allows abusers to marry other women. It’s a take-it-or-leave-it-situation, marriage, no matter how dreadful it may turn out to be, even if it wasn’t your fault.

I don’t know what ‘studies’ the Camilleris have to justify their prejudices towards infertile women and battered women, apart from their faith. I know they just come from the same conservative milieu of people like Kate Gonzi, who felt at liberty to tell the world her opinion on the un-virtuousness of pre-marital sex. They fall in line with the same prejudice of finance minister Tonio Fenech (who claims the Virgin Mary sheds tears for the Maltese), who scapegoats single mothers as targets for benefit fraud while eulogising the virtues of stay-home mothers like his wife.

[Keep in mind that of an average 1,000 children born out of wedlock every year, 31% to single mothers. In 2008 we spent €9.5 million on 2,678 women (€3,547 per capita). It’s not the biggest drain on a country which spent €20 million on its Brussels embassy to the European Union.]

I don’t know if you see it the way I do. But their idealistic vision of a society made up of virgin wives and the supremacy of the Catholic church is simply a reflection of their religious chauvinism. Are we ready to let these mullahs control our lives?