Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1309486
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 15 NOVEMBER 2020 Raphael Vassallo OPINION Edwin Vassallo may be a 'dinosaur'… but he is not quite 'extinct' yet I'VE said it before, and I'll say it again. Hardly surprising that the makers of 'Jurassic World III' – a film about genetically-engi- neered dinosaurs, wreaking hav- oc and destruction in the 21st century – would choose precise- ly Malta as a movie location. If nothing else, the special ef- fects department alone is prob- ably saving itself a small for- tune on CGI. No need for any blue-screen, or 'Adobe After Effects', or expensive digital en- hancements at post-production stage; no, all they have to is set up a camera inside the House of Parliament, as it debates the Equality Bill; and… um… that's it, really. Short of actually inventing a Time Machine, and setting the dial for 65 million years ago… it's the closest you'll ever get to a living, breathing Tyrannosaurus Rex. Then again, however, I fear that it is altogether too easy to dismiss people like Edwin Vas- sallo – whose latest outburst equates Europe's current drive towards equality with some kind of 'totalitarian Marxist plot' – as 'dinosaurs'. Too easy… and also just a lit- tle unfair on the poor creatures themselves. Let me put it this way: I would have thought it was bad enough they all got wiped off the face of the planet by an asteroid impact, all that time ago… but to also get themselves compared to Edwin Vassallo, 65 million years later? I mean, come on: that's a bit harsh, don't you think? And besides: the comparison doesn't really hold, anyway. Re- al dinosaurs – e.g., Stegosaurus, Triceratops, T. Rex, T. Borg, etc. – all had a good excuse for hav- ing such antediluvian views on social morals. They really were 'antediluvian', you know: in the sense that their existence actual- ly predated the Biblical flood by several aeons, at least. What's Edwin Vassallo's ex- cuse, I wonder? He's a product of the late 20th century: so like the rest of us, he has also witnessed all the extraordinary social and political transformations that have taken place here over the past 20 or so years (indeed, his own party was itself – albeit sometimes very reluctantly – part of that same transforma- tional force). Yet there he still is: clinging tenaciously to a worldview that has been debunked, discredited, and unceremoniously dumped on the garbage heap of European history, for almost as long as the dinosaurs themselves have been extinct... Ah… but that, too, is part of the problem with the 'dinosaur' comparison. 'Dumped on the garbage heap of history', did I say? Perhaps… in the rest of Eu- rope. Here in Malta, however, homophobia and misogyny were 'dumped' from our political lexi- con a lot more recently than that – quite literally, in the last dec- ade alone – and even then: for the most part, only on paper. To put that another way: our laws and procedures may in- deed have all been upgraded to remove any discrimination on grounds of 'race, creed, gender, sexual orientation', and all the rest of it; but whether the atti- tudes themselves were ever fully exorcised from the local political mindset… that's a very different proposition. Quite frankly, it doesn't really look that way at all. For let's be honest: Edwin Vassallo is hard- ly the only Maltese politician who still argues in favour of laws which would actively discrimi- nate against gay or transgender people; or deny IVF therapy to infertile couples; or even make it illegal to access emergency con- traception in this country. Former Justice Minister (and European Health Commission- er, if you please) Tonio Borg has also taken to the Sunday papers, to put across more or less identi- cal arguments against the Equal- ity Bill. Recently, he even argued that Church schools should be free to discriminate against non-Catho- lic applicants for teaching po- sitions, even on subjects other than Religion… on the grounds that "the Catholic ethos perme- ates the entire curriculum, in- cluding such subjects as science, ethics and philosophy." (Be- cause, as we all know, the fun- damental principles of science work one way for Catholics, and another way for everyone else…) But let me not get bogged down in the pointless exercise of actu- ally answering these, and other nonsensical claims. The bottom line is that, even if we have now expunged our le- gal framework of all the outdat- ed (and sometimes shockingly discriminatory) terminology it was riddled with until quite re- cently… and even if (to be fair) most Maltese politicians have, by now, evolved just a little bit beyond the Jurassic Era – at least, in the sense that no longer regard rampant homophobia as a badge to be worn with (ahem) 'pride' – the reality is that those antiquated attitudes are still very much alive and kicking today: not just among certain politi- cians, but – much more impor- tantly – among sizeable swathes of the wider population, too. And this should hardly surprise us, because… well, it was only a few short years ago that those same attitudes were not just widely accepted and embraced, across the board; but they actu- ally formed the fossilized back- bone of pretty much all Malta's legislation concerning social policy. For instance: in 2009 – that's just 11 years ago, folks – the European Commission opened infringement procedures against the Maltese government, specif- ically for refusing to include a reference to 'same-sex couples' when transposing the European Free Movement Directive into national law. Once again it was Tonio Borg who objected to the clause; and he even argued, in Parliament at the time, that "only relationships that were in Malta's national in- terest should be recognised." That same year, Borg went on to accuse Joseph Muscat of trying to 'regularise gays [!]'… because the former Opposition leader had proposed including same-sex couples in the wording of the rent-law reform bill. "We will only protect those who deserve protection," Borg added; and… well, there you have it, I suppose, straight from the dinosaur's mouth. Only heterosexual couples were 'in the national interest', back in 2009; and as for gay couples… they didn't 'deserve protection' (even though, here as elsewhere, same-sex couples are statisti- cally far likelier to be victims of prejudice, discrimination, and