Joe Borg's essence of vileness

In his weekly column on The Sunday Times, Joe Borg, a priest, put up one of the vilest piles of lies that I have seen in a while, reminiscent of the kind of writings the Nazis used to publish about Jews.

The subject of this invective is Tonio Borg, Malta's nominee to fill the post of John Dalli as EU commissioner responsible for health and civil rights. His nomination was greeted with surprise and dismay by most Europeans - the man is one of the least competent to take on the job. Since the commission he'd be responsible for includes responsibility for the rights of gay people, racial minorities, women and so on, why would the Maltese government put forward someone who is openly homophobic, who has tried to entrench Malta's anti-abortion laws into the constitution and whose decision to repatriate immigrants when there was clear evidence they were going to be tortured on arrival made international headlines? To me the answer is simple: The party wants to pave the way for Simon Busuttil to take over as second-in-command (so he'll be in place to take over from Gonzi should the party suffer a humiliating defeat) so Tonio Borg must go - and this is his farewell gift. However that is speculation on my part and not what this discussion is about.

According to Joe Borg, the only thing standing between Tonio Borg and his seat in the commission is an "anti-Christian secularist lobby". That this is a lie is made obvious by the fact that both of Tonio Borg's predecessors were Christians and neither of them raised these kinds of objections. In the case of ex-commissioner Joe Borg (a different person), it was because he was in charge of agriculture and fisheries - so no concerns about civil rights there - and in the case of John Dalli because whatever his personal religious beliefs, he demonstrated that he was quite capable of keeping apart his duty and his faith. Tonio Borg is different. He has a badly tarnished record of using his position to impose his beliefs on everyone else. If any sense of fairness prevails, he will be thanked for his application and sent back with a "next candidate please". Joe Borg (the priest again) lies about the reason for the objections - he says that the objectors are against him "because he espouses Christian values". That is only true if homophobia, sexism, racism and breaching basic human rights are "Christian values". Joe Borg digs deeper into his innate hate and vileness to compare secularists to suicide bombers as well as the far right racists. He forgot to mention that we're also responsible for storms and epidemics, sold our soul to the devil and eat babies for breakfast.

He then goes on to say how Christians (who make up BY FAR the biggest religious group) are poor persecuted people - in the west, and especially in Europe! I kid you not. Actually he was repeating the pope's brainfart there. He claims that secularists (whom he calls anti-Christians) "discriminate against Christians in public roles by requiring them to act against their conscience". Maybe he should ask the clergy in Pakistan, who are constantly lobbying for the country to be made more secular. I don't blame them - they get discriminated against, so they want more secularism - they know that secularism guarantees freedom of religion and a level playing field. But in Malta and Europe, where they are a majority and frequently enjoy a privileged position for historical reasons - where THEY are the discriminators - they think that being prevented from perpetuating their traditional discrimination is in itself a discrimination against them. He thinks that Christians have a right to harm gay people, or suppress women, or discriminate against religious minorities and if they're not allowed to do this, they're the victims. The truth is that if you occupy a public office which gives you certain authorities, you may not abuse your position to push your personal ideologies. If you are a marriage registrar, your job requires you to check the papers and rubber stamp the certificate. If you're a racist you are not permitted to refuse to marry someone whose race you don't like. Similarly if the law of the land says that gays can marry, if you're homophobic you are not permitted to deny marriage to a same-sex couple simply because you personally don't believe it should be done - even if you can pull verses from your preferred book of religious scripture to support your point. If you want the job of commissioner responsible, among other things, for gay rights, and if you've publicly expressed - in parliament - the view that same-sex couples should not have the same inheritance rights where property is concerned - among other things - then yes, you should expect some very pointed questions in that area and if you don't live up to expectations you should not get the job.

So it all now depends on whether Tonio Borg can convince the EU that he was joking in the past when he resisted allowing same-sex couples access to housing, when he tried everything to prevent women from having access to abortion, when he sent escaping migrants back to the torturers. If he can convince them that he is now pro-equal rights vis a vis women, gays, people with a darker skin than his own etc., then maybe he'll get the job. Of course he might disappoint Joe Borg if he sets aside the "Christian Values" of homophobia and so on, but then it's not a Maltese election he'll be contesting next.

Not Voting?

I'm seeing lots of people recently declaring that they're not going to vote - and this is of course, their right. However many of them think that this "sends a message".

It doesn't.

The only people politicians listen to are voters, or future voters - but not non-voters. You won't get politicians going door to door in hotels full of tourists, or schools. If you tell them "I'm not going to vote" they'll move on to the next person because, as far as politicians are concerned, non-voters are non-entities.

Not voting means that you're willing to let others choose for you. You may be as disillusioned as hell with our current batch of politicians, and I don't blame you. Ultimately however, we are going to have a parliament and a government and it is going to be formed from those candidates whether you make a choice between them or not. Even if only 0.1% of the Maltese electorate turn out to vote, there will still be a parliament and a government.

So, if there are any issues that you care about, find out about where politicians stand on those issues, and vote for those politicians that are closest to your own position. Don't expect to find many politicians that match your own likes and dislikes perfectly. Elections are not about finding someone who's perfect but finding the best choice out of what's available. Individual candidates can make a big difference - as shown by recent events. And if they do come knocking on your door, make sure that they know which issues you care about, and that this is going to affect your vote. Having a parliament that has lots of MPs that agree with your most important issues increases the likelihood of getting a parliament and government that disappoints you less next time round.

Violence, Marriage Breakups and a decline in morality

This is a response to Lino Spiteri's article on The Times yesterday.

Why is violence on the rise? A few days ago we had a group of people caught beating up a man while surrounded by reporters, cameras and so on. They got a paltry €60 fine. A couple of days ago a man was charged with cutting open a man's face from forehead to lips - he got just over €100. Yesterday, two men chased down a man for "flirting" with a woman who was their relative. The police arrested and charged the victim because, during the chase, he ran over and damaged a car. No mention was made of actions taken against the aggressors. This leniency for violent crimes clashes with the draconian sentences meted out to anyone caught growing cannabis - an activity that causes nobody any harm. Examples like this serve to erode the public's confidence in the courts, which in turn may lead to the more hot-headed of them to not bother with the courts to seek redress over clashes with other people, and take matters into their own hands.

As far as marriage breakups are concerned, I know of no simple answer. This of course is happening everywhere in the world. It could be a result of a more hectic lifestyle which leaves less time for one another, or a culture where the couple are more concerned with getting than with giving, or increasing financial and other stresses. Another reason of course is that there no longer is the same kind of social stigma associated with marriage breakups - especially if there aren't children involved. Of course this only means that, in the past, many couples continued living under one roof long after their marriage was ended, merely for the sake of appearances.

I certainly agree that the police should be equipped with "non-lethal weapons" to give them a middle-ground between a stern voice and a deadly weapon. However we should be careful that, first of all, most "non-lethal weapons" are in fact "less likely to be lethal weapons". Many such weapons can and do kill - so we must look beyond the manufacturers' brochures. Secondly, we must ensure that our police do not abuse of them simply because they are non-lethal. In recent times we've seen photos from abroad of police officers using pepper-spray in the faces of protesters who were seated and posing no danger to anyone.

As for the concept of God, people are simply realising that there is no link between morality and gods or church. Cases like last year's divorce referendum and the current debate on IVF have opened people's eyes to the fact that the church's morality is highly flawed - and that their own sense of ethics is superior to the church's, which remains mired in dogmatic rules based on a book of stories from the iron age. Of course it's irrelevant today. It's been irrelevant for centuries. Morality, on the other hand, is not. It's only the source of that morality that has changed.

Litany of Hate

Sometimes it seems that, when things are too quiet around here, the Gozitan bishop Mario Grech decides to stir things up a little.

Last weekend he decided to take a swipe at the family. Not just any family of course - the one consisting of one man married to one woman, with children is perfectly ok. In fact it's the only one that is a family at all according to Grech. No other relationship is a family. If the couple are unmarried, they and their children do not form a family. They're just a group of people who live in the same house - a household. Same with all single parents, all widows and widowers, all same-sex couples (with or without children), all couples who were previously married. In fact, since a critical feature of all families is "procreation" between the man and woman, and since Mary supposedly remained a virgin all her life, I suppose the "Holy Family" must now be renamed to the Holy Household, because they do not meet the bishop's qualifications for a family.

Keep in mind that this is a pastoral letter, which - if my memory serves me correctly - is read out during mass at all churches that fall under his clutches. Imagine a child hearing this declaration from the bishop that he/she and his/her parents are not a real family because mummy and daddy are not married, or a single mother who performs almost superhuman feats to feed and clothe and care for her children getting this verbal slap on the face as she is told that hers is not a family. They're just people who happen to share the same address.

However this is not merely quibbling about the definition of the word "family". Grech also insists that the state should not give equal legal/civil rights to any type of "household" that does not match his personal definition. He describes as blind those political, economical and media institutions that give equal recognition to these other "households".

Is it possible that the bishop does not have someone to go over these letters before he sends them out from his reliquary? Oh wait he does - the letter was jointly written with the chancellor, one Salv Debrincat. Nicely done chancellor.

This attempt to redefine the family to this supposedly ideal mold is an attack on every other family - and these are not a few. It is hurtful, it is wrong, and I'm sure the bishop and chancellor know this perfectly well.

In fact many may have noticed that this was not the only attack on the family carried in the same Sunday paper. On the same paper we've got other attacks from two other priests, Paul Chetcuti and Joe Borg. All are out with guns blazing, attacking the idea that a family can consist of anything other than one man and one woman with children. Coincidence? I think not. I think they are either setting the stage to undermine the cohabitation law that the government promised to table soon, or are trying to turn society against same-sex couples in order to reduce the chances of gay marriage or civil unions being introduced to Malta. In either case, this is a case of attacking and hurting and harming people - and to what avail? Will married heterosexual couples with children be happier knowing that elsewhere, a childless couple will be denied state recognition as a family? Will their marriage be stronger in the knowledge that two women or two men will never be granted the same legal and civil rights as they are? No. So why these diatribes? Could it be that the only thing they are protecting is the church's collective ego? Let these people suffer as long as the church doesn't have to admit to a mistake until it's unavoidable. Maybe after 350 years, like Galileo.

Our constitution says that the church has the duty to teach what is right and what is wrong. This pastoral letter shows that the church is either incapable or unwilling to perform this duty. Somewhere along the way, the church has lost track of what is right and what is wrong - if they ever knew - and the time has come to get rid of this article from our constitution and establish a proper wall of separation between church and state.

Marijuana - Legalise or not?
Information Collection
Websites in Malta have recently been inundated by news and opinions about marijuana and Malta's harsh sentences meted out to those who use it. This was triggered by the 11-year sentence to Daniel Holmes for having two plants in his house in Gozo. The emotionally-loaded comments posted by both sides reminded me of the Divorce War in Malta. Just as divorce had been linked with everything from family breakdowns to earthquakes and weeping madonnas, it seemed to me that the same thing was happening here.

So, just as I did with divorce, I decided to find things out for myself. Fortunately, there is a flood of information available - more so than in the case of divorce since the divorce issue had already been settled long ago almost everywhere else.

Here is a page with the best material I found. I have tried to keep everything objective - I included both pages for and against legalisation - but I'll say up front that what I found led me to conclude that marijuana should be legalised.
I will be updating this page with more information as I find it.

Reports, Studies and Articles
Global Commission on Drugs Policy Report
This commission studies the impact on drugs and comes up with a set of proposals for formulating drug policies. The commission recommends "End the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but who do no harm to others", and "Encourage experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs ... This recommendation applies especially to cannabis ..."

What can we learn from the Portuguese Decriminalization of Illicit Drugs?
This report from the British Journal of Criminology describes the result of Portogal's decriminalisation of ALL drugs in 2001. From the abstract: "It concludes that contrary to predictions, the Portuguese decriminalization did not lead to major increases in drug use. Indeed, evidence indicates reductions in problematic use, drug-related harms and criminal justice overcrowding." (click the "Full Text" links for the entire report - payment required).


Time Magazine: Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?
"The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled."

Cannabis and Cannabinoids (US National Cancer Institute)
This website describes findings about the use of cannabis for the treatment of cancer. The above link is quite technical but there's another link on the page with simpler information for patients. This page describes how cannabis is effective both in attacking the cancer itself, and in alleviating the side-effects of chemotherapy.

Videos

1. Clearing the Smoke - the Science of Cannabis
This is a full-length documentary produced by the PBS in Montana, USA. 

2. When we grow, this is what we can do

3. BBC: Cannabis: What's the Harm? (part 1 of 2)

4. National Geographic: Marijuana Nation (part 1 of 5)

How generous is the church really?

In response to the recent report that the church is broke and getting broker by the minute, lots of people have spoken out in defence of the church, saying how it takes care of the old, orphans etc. However when I looked at the accounts published recently I was struck by the fact that these actually form a very small percentage of the church's expenses. In fact, the Pope's visit of last year cost 6.6 times as much as all children's homes combined.

The church's income comes primarily from donations, collections etc. I wonder whether the people making the donations are thinking that they are donating towards orphanages and homes. Do they know that, if they donated €50 last year, €2 from that went to finance the pope's visit, compared to the 30 cents that went to children's homes, or the 38 cents that went to old people's homes?

The church is not generous. Nor is it ungenerous. The church is an organiser - it collects money and redistributes it. The generosity comes from the Maltese people - they're the ones who earned the money. They hear of poor people and they donate. They donate to a church charity just as they donate to L-Istrina and to the Inspire foundation and other worthy causes.

If I found out that one of the secular humanitarian charities I donate to spent €1 million out of a grand total of €26 million to send their CEO on a trip somewhere, I'd immediately stop patronising them because I'd feel that they had betrayed their mission. If they spent 1.5 times as much on the media as they spend on the homes I'd say they have their priorities wrong.

I'd also say that if someone wants to help the needy, there are better entities than the church to ensure that your money is primarily used for that purpose.

Creationism: why it is dangerous

Some time ago I went to observe a presentation given by a creationist from the UK. I did this out of concern about the first signs of this phenomenon in Malta. Some people don't see any problems with creationism. It's just a belief, they say. I would like to point out why creationism is a dangerous phenomenon.

First however I should clarify what I mean by creationism. All Christians and most religious people believe that God created the universe, and technically this is creationism. However the creationism I have in mind, and the creationism presented by this visiting speaker, is the belief that the entire universe, including the world and every form of life on it, was created over a literal 6-day period, approximately 6000 years ago. It generally includes the belief that, some time after this, the entire surface of the planet was completely covered by water, drowning every living thing except for the contents of one large boat, and that it is from the animals and humans that were on this boat, that all life on earth today is derived, from kangaroos in Australia to polar bears at the North Pole, from tigers in India to grizzlies in the US, from Inuit to Somalis to Nepalese.

Most Christians do not believe these things literally of course, but there is a strong lobby in certain parts of the world, notably the United States. It is from here that most creationist churches hail, and they have established "missions" around the world - including Malta - to spread their particular beliefs.
I'm all for religious freedom, but most religious beliefs are relatively harmless. Creationism is different. Consider for a while how many areas of science are contradicted by creationism: It explicitly contradicts evolution, which is a fundamental area of biology. It contradicts geology due to its insistence that the entire world is 6000 years old. It contradicts cosmology, since it insists that nothing can be more than 6000 light years away. It explicitly contradicts the big bang and the age of the universe. It contradicts radiometric dating, especially carbon dating. It even contradicts local prehistory - the age of the early megalithic temples would have to be rewritten, not to mention Għar Dalam and other remains.

Now, if someone is a pensioner, they can believe anything they like about the above and it's unlikely to affect their lives. If he or she is an adult with an established career that does not involve any of the above areas, they are unlikely to be affected either. However children are a different matter. Creationism contradicts almost all branches of science, which means that children would be denied a very important part of their education - education that ultimately translates into good potential careers, such as medicine, microbiology, physics, several areas of engineering and many others. After all, when people go to a doctor they want someone who believes in medicine, not someone who insists that the bacteria cannot possibly be evolving a resistance to antibodies.

These problems caused directly by denying science is only one aspect of the dangers of creationism. In the United States and other places, a more insidious danger is becoming more obvious. Creationism has created an atmosphere of "us versus them" between students and teachers. Students, especially teenagers, are already naturally inclined to rebel. When they are getting constant encouragement from their parents and priests to reject and ridicule the science that their teachers are trying to explain, this attitude affects all areas of education, and educational levels plummet across the board.

Of course, even creationists have abandoned several arguments they used to use, and steer clear of others. The creationist organisation "Answers in Genesis" has a webpage containing arguments that they feel are so discredited that their use is actually detrimental to their cause, and no creationists today argue that the world is flat. And yet, the Bible implies this in Matthew 4:8, where we have a mountain which is so high that you can see the entire world from it. Similarly, few Christians today literally believe that rainbows were placed there by a god who might otherwise forget his promise and drown everyone in the world again. Today we know a thing or two about optics, refraction, water droplets and so on, so we accept rainbows for what they are - colourful, beautiful but quite natural phenomena.


The problem with creationism is that it imposes a strict precondition on knowledge. Everything has to agree with a literal interpretation of every part of the Bible. Any evidence that does not is rejected, or must somehow be reinterpreted to fit. Rather than going for the most obvious and reasonable explanation, one must go to extreme lengths to fit the Biblical account. A simple example is, how did all the animals from the ark get to the various places around the world without leaving any individuals behind - no koalas or walruses in the middle east for instance. When asked what did the lions eat in the ark, some will even insist they were vegetarians back then. After all if you only have two gazelle you can't afford to let the lions run amok.

With science, by comparison, one starts with the evidence, and finds explanations to match. If the evidence is not what you expect or want to find, you have to accept that and revise your expectations. Just a couple of days ago as I write this, scientists working at CERN and Italy published preliminary results that indicated they may have seen a particle exceed the speed of light. This discovery, if confirmed, is shocking and will bring a significant chunk of physics crashing down, because they are based on the premise that nothing, nothing, can exceed the speed of light. And yet as this news sent shock waves through the entire scientific community, there is no sense of animosity. Certainly many have expressed doubts and speculated that we might still discover that it was some kind of mistake in the measurements, but if it is confirmed, then the affected areas will be revised or, if necessary, discarded and rewritten.

It is this willingness to admit to mistakes and correct them that sets science apart from creationism. By starting off with the assumption that they cannot possibly be mistaken in their, creationists attack the evidence and resist learning anything new.