Divorce will lead to rise in cohabitation (2)

A priest who was a guest on a local TV programme recently said that a family is only a family when the couple are married.

To some extent I agree with the Church when it confronts the moral issue of divorce but I cannot agree with someone saying on a TV talk show that cohabitants or divorcees should not be equal to a married couple.

Is a cohabiting person unfit to raise children?

Does he not pay taxes like a married person?

Does he not obey laws like the married person?

Marriage from a religious point of view is a moral value, but the family as a whole is a social issue.

In all definitions of a family there is not one that states a couple have to be married in order to make up a family.

Are separated people who cohabit, especially those who have children, not a family?

Who is taking care of the children if not their parents? And what extra right does a married couple have over a cohabiting couple who are as responsible as the others who are married

Are married couples being pictured as the ‘elite of society’?

Are people against divorce because they see divorcees as some sort of threat, and are afraid of them enjoying ‘equality’, so they want them to cohabit instead of being able to divorce?

The Church, or rather some priests, are mixing up everything in order to stop divorce from being introduced in Malta, and they are using secular people to impose their views on local media.

The Church has its ways and means of dissolving marriages. In my and many other people’s opinion the annulment process it uses is very questionable.

But no one ever interfered with the Church’s annulment process even though it dissolves marriages, but on the other hand the Church is interfering with the state on the introduction of divorce.

If the Church has the right to dissolve marriages from its moral point of view, so does the state from its social point of view to give separated couples their social and civil rights.

The only political party which is making sense in this divorce debate is Alternattiva Demokratika.