Growing support for 'gay marriage'

In your leader (June 5) you joined the Archbishop in using terminology that would be recognised in the civilised world as homophobic. The use of such terminology is likely to be part of a campaign aimed at putting pressure on Malta's government to go on denying its gay and lesbian citizens their civil rights by applying religious instead of secular criteria in its decision-making process.

With respect, which is more than you showed your gay and lesbian fellow citizens, your piece looked more like the transcript of a Sunday morning sermon than the editorial of the leading newspaper in a Western democracy.

From the comfort of one's cocoon, that makes one believe that one alone possesses the Truth and have a divine right to dictate how other people should reach their fulfilment in life, it is very easy to blindly repeat Mgr Mercieca's unfounded arguments regarding same-sex marriage.

We believe that, apart from providing a false reassurance to those who are so certain about their unquestioned beliefs that they are not willing to consider - or even listen to - others' points of view, such arguments can serve for nothing more than to instil a sense of contempt or hatred among your readers against gay people (who, you might be tempted to forget, form a good chunk of your readership).

Like Mgr Mercieca, you have chosen to make use of negative words and phrases such as "permissive", "makes nonsense of the institution and purpose of marriage" and "hits at the very foundations of the family as the most stable element of society" when referring to the legal and social validation of the committed loving relationships between same-sex couples.

It might be considered a very safe option to hit out at a vulnerable minority and try to use it as a scapegoat when things start going wrong on your side of the hedge. While firing your judgmental cannons against the love between two adults of the same sex and trying to portray it as a threat to traditional marriage and society itself, you yourself point out what an excellent job heterosexuals are doing in wrecking the "most stable element of society".

According to a reply to a parliamentary question given by Justice Minister Tonio Borg on May 2, there are currently around a thousand marriage separation cases pending before the Family Court. Allow us to also remind you that Malta has the second highest rate of marriage annulments by the Church in the whole world. Surely, you cannot blame the gay and lesbian community for all this!

We feel that also unfair is the way the Archbishop and yourself, as part of Malta's conservative establishment, try to deceptively place same-sex marriage in the same basket with unrelated issues such as abortion and euthanasia, which involve the right to life. Are you considering winning the battle over same-sex marriage with all your cards on the table such an impossible task that you have been left with no other option but to resort to these dirty tricks? Well, it seems like it.

Just look at how you have simply repeated the Archbishop's unfounded claims while suppressing your journalistic instinct to demand that he substantiate them. You have repeated his assertion that same-sex marriage goes "against the Law of Nature", but you have failed to ask yourself and Mgr Mercieca whether marriage itself is "natural" and whether, for instance, celibacy by choice is according to the Law of Nature.

Marriage itself is a social convention adopted by humankind and comes in a variety of forms varying through history and across cultures. Furthermore, it would have taken you just a few clicks on your computer mouse to find out that homosexuality is found in around 450 species besides the human race.

We feel that your leader has, maybe unwittingly, misled your readers when it referred to the "shameful rejection" of Rocco Buttiglione's nomination as a member of the European Commission for stating his belief that the homosexual act is sinful. You lament that, because of this, he has been labelled a fundamentalist, "a favourite epithet levelled at those who are not afraid or ashamed to stand by their Christian beliefs".

What you left out of the picture, maybe unwittingly, is that the real reason why the European Parliament rejected Mr Buttiglione was not his Christian beliefs. Allow me to remind you that Mr Buttiglione, in true Christian spirit, had proposed the removal of sexual orientation as a ground for discrimination from the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights. This shows that all this was not merely a matter of personal belief but that he actively wanted to impose his own values in the execution of his public function, in so doing betraying the policies of the European Union itself.

Certainly, you and your paper have every right to endorse Mgr Mercieca's point of view. However we wonder what, if not bigotry and fear of change, urges you to campaign so hard to see your own set of religious values imposed on the rest of society. True, it is very easy to campaign for the majority to impose its values on all and sundry as long as you form part of the comfortable majority... or of what you perceive to be so.

In fact, you swallowed and repeated the Archbishop's claim that those in favour of gay marriage in Malta are "few in number". We wonder why the Archbishop's Curia and leading newspapers such as The Sunday Times take so much pain and dedicate so much time, column space and energy to attack these "few people"!

Allow me to remind you that a survey carried out by EOS Gallup Europe in January 2003 showed that 23 per cent of the Maltese people agreed with same-sex marriage then. In January 2003 approximately six out of every ten EU citizens agreed with the general authorisation of marriage among gay couples.

Since then we have seen the EU make great leaps forward in this respect. Gay marriage is now available in the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain. Other member states such as Denmark, Finland, Sweden, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Poland and the UK grant legal recognition to registered gay partnerships.

Even non-EU member European countries are moving forward. Andorra, Iceland and Norway have passed registered partnership laws. Only last week, the majority of the Swiss voted in a referendum to see registered same-sex couples treated the same as heterosexual married couples for tax and pension purposes.

The rate at which the Malta Gay Rights Movement, and support for its cause, is growing makes us confident that a majority in favour of same-sex marriage is slowly but steadily being built locally as well. The homophobic campaign being mounted by the country's conservative field somehow tells us that we are not the only ones who are aware of this trend.