Meet the wife: she’s called Olive

On the same day that the Nationalist Party announced that it had a special Green policy with its own section in the party, the government opened a Gay Pride centre that it has built and financed on Gozo. A coincidence or what?

The Green Party (ADPD) in Malta has usually been considered to be well-meaning but harmless. No threat, normally, to either of the main parties. However, it is a vote-catcher: a place for people who feel that they should exercise their democratic duty yet can’t bring themselves to vote either PL or PN.

But the way party politics stand here at the moment, in the next election the biggest vote could be the protest vote. The problem then becomes what Green means.

I was in Germany when Greenery was invented and I watched a ragtag bunch of assorted environmentalists and disarmers marching – or, rather, shambling – with a call to save the planet from environmental or nuclear extinction. They were soon joined by dropped-out students, rebels without a cause, under-employed academics, loony lefties and general misfits who didn’t much care for organised government.

When they were not blocking traffic, they besieged NATO camps, apparently without realising that the soldiers inside them were fighting for peace, too.

One of the founders was a driven lass called Petra Kelly who, within three years, was elected to the Bundestag at the age of 24. She called herself an eco-feminist. And, there, the rot set in.

She extended the party (die Grünen) to include feminists and Gay Pride and campaigned for the abolition of age-of-consent laws, which meant opening party membership to paedophiles. But hers was the first Green party and it quickly spread worldwide.

The question now for Maltese voters is that, by voting Green, rather than PL or PN, they know what they are voting against… but do they know what they are voting for?

Do tree-huggers have to support gays, whether they like it or not? Does saving the planet mean approval of men who ‘self-identify’ as women, when sent to jail or joining a women’s gym?

When the Wall came down, the East Germans formed their own Grüne Partei (because they could) with a logo showing the outline of a human head and a tree where the brain would be. Which I thought summed them up nicely. Hoping for extra support, they campaigned with the Independent Women’s League (I will spare you the translation). They won eight seats but couldn’t agree how to split them, so the women went home and left the Greens to it.

But if you are against pollution or nuclear power stations, does that mean you support ‘quotas’ for women, as opposed to appointment by merit? Does it mean you are in favour of legalising cannabis (like the Greens are)?

I am not involved, by the way: I have planted 49 trees in Gozo. Mine seem to manage okay without being hugged.

My old granny would never have heard of tree-huggers. If she had, she’d probably have forecast that “no good will come of it”. So I’m glad that she wasn’t able to read The Daily Telegraph recently where there was a story about 70 women in Bristol who ‘married’ trees to stop them being felled to make space for housing.

They (the women) all wore wedding dresses for the occasion. One of them said: “To get married to a tree is an absolute privilege. It is not just a sentimental gesture, it is highly significant and symbolic. Trees are pure examples of unconditional love, which fits so beautifully with the whole idea of marriage…”

So, I could marry one of my trees. And call her Olive. Grey Pride, maybe, would welcome us.

That would be a whole new colour for the spectrum and also ‘fit so beautifully’ with the tree-for-brain logo. Gays are already proud enough, thank you very much. They don’t need support from Olive and me.

My point is that gays and lesbians ‒ and feminists ‒ can comfortably be in any party and they can (and do) get elected without being on a Green ticket. Homosexual men and women that I know don’t want any special rights, or recognition: only the same rights as heterosexuals, which, in most civilised countries, they mostly have.

So why do the Greens insist on waving the rainbow flag? And does the Ministry of Gozo know what it is saying by hoisting it?

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