The Constitution is not a tomb

It's a pity that, in all this talk of reforming (possibly rewriting) the present Constitution, we seem to have missed out on the first most logical question to ask.

It is a question I myself was once asked... despite being so eminently unqualified to answer it. This was in 2005: a time when the present government had launched itself, Muhajeddin-like, into a crusade to entrench Malta's anti-abortion law into the same document.

Discussing this same issue with a diverse group of people, I remember how a man - around 27 years old, only recently graduated from University as an engineer (or something similar) - suddenly turned around to me and very innocently asked: what is a Constitution, anyway? And why is it so important?

At the time I was so taken by surprise I couldn't answer. All I remember was a vague sense of horror at the sudden realization that someone could go through a full 10 years of schooling, followed by another six or seven years at University, and still not know whence the source of the nation's legal authority is actually derived.

And that's when it hit me. In one sudden moment of clarity, I realized how very precarious the situation of our fragile democracy was (and still is)... how, given the sheer pervasiveness of national ignorance on such a crucial subject, one could hardly be surprised when a bunch of motivated, energetic and unscrupulous people would seize the opportunity to transform the same Constitution - supposedly the principle guarantor of the people's sovereignty and freedom - into a graveyard where their own private fantasies and wish-lists could be mummified and preserved.

The vision filled me with nausea at the time; and to be honest it still does. In the case of the abortion amendment, the express purpose was to "make it as difficult as possible for future generations to introduce abortion". In practice, it meant simply exploiting the two-thirds majority proviso - supposedly a safeguard against government abuse of power - to place the entire topic of discussion out of reach of future generations of politicians (also 'unborn children', incidentally) who may - shock, horror, etc - reason slightly differently from themselves.

The counter-argument should have been obvious at the time - and yet it never really came from anyone other than a few lone voices in the media. How about we replace the word 'abortion' with something else that a large number of bullies wanted to place out of reach of all local discussion? Divorce, for instance... which at the time was still unobtainable locally (indeed many people argued that there should also be a Constitutional ban to this effect).

With the hindsight of last year's referendum, I think most would agree (well, most democratic people, at any rate) that applying this same ploy to divorce would have resulted in the antithesis of democracy.

And yet the mechanics of the argument are identical to those of the abortion proposal: it is a mentality that views one single dominant ideology as so desirable the freedom of future generations can quite happily be sacrificed to preserve it.

Now if this were a one-off initiative, it would be bad enough. But the blunt truth of our country's entire Constitutional history is that Malta has ALWAYS regarded this legal document simply as a means of controlling the population, and limiting its present and future freedoms. We saw this in 1962, when the Archbishop exerted enormous pressure to ensure the inclusion of Article 2: which states that "the Religion of Malta is the Roman Catholic religion." (This, mind you, at a time when the party in opposition was labouring under ecclesiastical sanctions: including the imposition of 'mortal sin' on anyone who voted for it in the '62 election.)

Just like 2005 - only with more success - a single, powerful lobby group had managed to imprint its own dominant and divisive ideology onto the nation's very identity... in part to ensure that future generations would not be given the opportunity to question that same identity, even if it no longer matched up to the reality on the ground.

And today, almost exactly 50 years later, it seems we are in danger of making the same mistake yet again: once more attempting to transform the Constitution of Malta into a tomb - this time to permanently bury an archaic and outmoded notion of our 'national identity' before people get a chance to challenge it.

The Malta Humanist Association (of which I am a committee member) has separately raised its concerns with our worryingly flawed approach to Constitutional reform: I have little to add to that statement now... other than to urge the President of the Republic not to allow the same mistakes of the past to be repeated on his watch.