After reading Paul Mizzi's comments on gay marriage and the Church (The Sunday Times, January 4), I feel compelled to reply. Mr Mizzi must understand that rules and regulations are for the people and the people should not be there for the rules and regulations.

Jesus Christ himself said this when religious clerics confronted Him with the fact that his disciples were breaking religious rules. And this is what healthy religion is meant to be: a religion of love, not one of legal narrowness.

Rules and regulations have their rightful place, but only insofar as they provide guidelines for loving actions. Whenever such rules are barriers to love, and are making people suffer needlessly, as is the case with the prohibition against homosexual love, we must not only bend laws, but abolish them altogether.

Any ban on gay love and marriage stems from human lack of understanding, not from God. According to Desmond Tutu, Archbishop Emeritus of South Africa and recipient of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, all expressions of love are expressions of the Divine: "The endless divisions that we create between us and that we live and die for ... are so totally irrelevant to God. God just wants us to love each other. Many, however, say that some kinds of love are better than others, condemning the love of gays and lesbians. But whether a man loves a woman or another man, or a woman loves a man or another woman, to God it is all love, and God smiles whenever we recognise our need for one another."

That is basically it. When two people are in love, what God looks out for is not their gender but what they feel in their hearts and think in their minds. What homosexual couples feel for one another is no different from what heterosexual couples feel. Thus there is no valid reason for denying marriage to homosexuals.