Every now and then I receive unwanted correspondence, the essence of which would be a torrent of insults and graphic descriptions of how I am a lesbian person, living with a gay person. It’s fascinating how some people have nothing else going in their lives and waste their free time fantasising about the sexual lives of others.

As it happens, these flights of imagination are pure fabrications: I am not lesbian, my partner is not gay but so what if we were? Where’s the offence in that?

It’s baffling that, in 2021, and with Malta boasting the most progressive civil rights policies in Europe, Maltese people go round spewing the words ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ as insults. But, alas, it’s pretty much the norm. ‘Pufta’ is still an offence spit out with venom; unmarried couples living together are still referred to with that derogative ‘poġġuti’.

So, in a nutshell, the government can introduce all the progressive laws it likes; the cultural mind set is still regressive.

There are two reasons for this: a) laws were introduced in our masochistic society without any parallel education campaigns and b) Super One, the Labour Party television station, is a daily hatred-spewing machine which thwarts the truth and dehumanises targets. Therefore, as a society, we are stuck in a rut.

The European commissioner for equality should know this very well because she is Maltese and Malta is a microcosm of the rest of the world. Therefore, when she drafted the European Commission’s guidelines for inclusive communication, she should have known better. But she didn’t because she thought that she still worked for the Maltese government, which pushes extreme liberal laws for the sake of quick votes even if it leaves society confused and lost.

And so it was that European Commission staffers were given a list of things not to say and not to write to make sure that “they lead by example” and for others to follow suit. No one was really impressed (except MEP Cyrus Engerer) and a whole hullabaloo ensued.

I read the 32-page booklet. In essence, Dalli wanted to be the cool dude promoting a totally neutral society. The whole thing reads like John Lennon’s Imagine – all that was missing was for Dalli to put on a pair of round specs and beads in her hair.

It’s all well and good to be a dreamer but the world is not a Beatles’ stage and she’s there to represent the nations that make up the EU, which are all Christian countries. So why on earth did she instruct the commission staff to “show sensitivity” and say ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Happy Christmas’ so as not to offend people who practise other religions? I mean, I’d be a real twat if I go to, say, India and be offended because someone tells me ‘Happy Diwali’ or if in the United Arab Emirates someone wishes me ‘Eid Mubarak’ or if in Israel I am told ‘Hanukkah sameach’. Why do we have to repress our own religion?

The whole thing reads like John Lenon’s Imagine – all that was missing was for Dalli to put on a pair of round specs and beads in her hair- Kristina Chetcuti

Have we become so delicate that we feel wounded by the very utterance of the name of a celebration of another religion? Are we so massively intolerant of each other’s cultures? Come to that, how about those who are going through a difficult time, won’t we be offending them by saying ‘happy holidays’? If we are truly this hypersensitive, then forget the guidelines; what we need are communal sessions at the shrink’s.

Engerer went on an overdrive defensive, going as far as lauding the Maltese way of greeting each other at Christmas. “We say Il-festi t-tajba,” he wrote on Twitter to show how we sensitively avoid the use of a word which denotes the birth of Jesus Christ.

Presumably, on December 25, Engerer wakes up and turns to his partner (ideally, we don’t say ‘husband or wife’, Dalli’s guidelines say) and tells him: “Il-festa t-tajba għażiż sieħeb”. Hello?! In the real world all Maltese people simply say “Merry Christmas”, in English. 

Dalli also tells her staff, and the rest of us by proxy, not to use ‘ladies and gentlemen’ but say ‘dear colleagues’. What if the audience is not made up of colleagues? What are we meant to say? “Yo! Hello dudes”?

There are more mind-boggling instructions. Her guidelines urge not to use the word ‘homosexual’ as “it can be considered offensive because it follows the medical model”; she says that people suffering from mental illnesses should be addressed as “neuro-diverse people”; and that we should not say “elderly” any more but “older people”. So, presumably, that makes those of us middle aged, the new teenagers.

Unsurprisingly, these guidelines were lambasted all over the EU. Emmanuel Macron described them as “nonsense, basically” and the pope compared them to Nazi secularisation. In Malta, because, God forbid (are we allowed to say ‘God’ anymore?) we look at the bigger picture, we, ahem, blamed Jason Azzopardi for stirring things up against the guidelines.

The commission subsequently announced it was withdrawing the guidelines, saying they “clearly require more work” The amount of money that Dalli’s DG spent on that 32-page document would have been spent much better on a widespread educational campaign targeting children and teaching them tolerance, empathy and awareness of cultural integration. She could also have worked on closing down hate-spewing media stations that are harming the very fibre of all societies around the EU.

The unfortunate result of Dalli’s utter extremism is that it makes people identify more with right-wing politics. By asking us to tiptoe around every word we utter, it makes us feel so lost that we hardly recognise the EU as a body we belong to anymore.