As was to be expected, Malta is about to legalise same-sex marriage. Within only a few years, traditional marriage has been hollowed out of any meaning whatsoever. It all started with divorce legislation, which the LGBT lobby canvassed for so eagerly. At least they knew what they were after. Those of us who warned that this would lead to gay marriage, abortion and euthanasia were ridiculed and shouted down.
Monogamous marriage between one man and one woman is the bedrock on which a civic society is built. Marriage and the traditional family will be undermined if homosexual partnerships are given the same legal ranking. What is the purpose of further weakening an institution that is already in a state of crisis?
This government, which came to power on a platform of transparency and democratic participation, has imposed one law after another without the least consideration of grass roots’ concerns. Unfortunately, certain politicians say one thing when they are in Opposition and do the contrary once in power.
The recipe is easy. If there is no popular demand for your agenda, do things incrementally. Thanks to their parliamentary majority and the reluctance of the Opposition to defend core values, the government has introduced gay adoption, changed laws outlawing vilification of religion, allowed the introduction of abortifacients under the guise of emergency contraceptives and now is further promoting the gender ideology agenda.
The root cause of this cultural change runs deep and is reflected in the fall of our country’s birth rate, the increase of broken marriages, cohabitation, children born out of wedlock and a rise in the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases.
Sadly, heterosexuals have themselves to blame for this sad state of affairs. The consequences of widespread contraception has now come to fruition. The breaking of the link between the unitive and life-giving aspects of sex has led to the miserable state we are in.
Sound families are the only bastion against a totalitarian State
Until 1930, every Christian denomination was unanimous in its condemnation of contraception. One only needs to the mention the following stark warnings from non-Catholic sources:
US President Theodore Roosevelt had said: “Contraception is the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death; a sin for which there is no atonement.”
Sigmund Freud had commented: “The abandonment of the reproductive function is the common feature of all perversions.”
Ghandi had also cautioned: “Moral results can only be produced by moral restraints… if contraceptive methods become the order of the day, nothing but moral degradation can be the result.”
However, one of the strongest condemnations for contraception came from the editorial of the March 22, 1931, edition of the Washington Post, entitled ‘Forgetting Religion’: “Contraception would sound the death knell of marriage as a holy institution by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalised contraceptives would be ‘careful and restrained’ is preposterous.”
As predicted, contraception has led to sexual immorality, broken relationships and abortion.
Locally, the dismal statistics say it all. Now, 30 per cent of children are born out of wedlock, with two-thirds having unknown fathers. Meanwhile, sexually transmitted diseases are on the rise while the birth rate plummets.
Yet it never fails to amaze me how the strident feminists who are so vociferous in condemning rape and domestic violence seem so indifferent to a culture that has reduced women to a being treated as men’s toys, where pornography is promoted and so-called gentlemen’s clubs sprout like mushrooms.
Amazingly, we have politicians who proudly announce that “contraception should be made widely available”. They fit the definition of being fanatics, namely, when in the wrong they redouble their efforts.
Will we take a stand to defend the lives of infants before birth, to support traditional or natural families, to welcome procreation within marriage, to oppose the latest demands of feminists and the LGBT lobby and to defend orthodox Christian sexual values and behaviour?
Sound families are the only bastion against a totalitarian State. Time will tell whether we will have the courage to put a stop to these corrosive, State-imposed policies.
Dr. Klaus Vella Bardon is deputy chairman of Life Network Foundation Malta.