I chose that title because I want to push back on some of the headlines that covered yesterday the announcement that someone that is supposed to answer to the name “Fr David Muscat’s sister” is contesting the upcoming general elections.
Fr David Muscat is the rabid racist who says grace at the fenkati presided by Norman Lowell, the Holocaust-denier who posted photos of his visit to the Berchtesgaden where he looks slightly more excited than my daughter looked in the photos of her pilgrimage to Disneyworld.
You’ve heard of him before. What you’ve never heard is Fr David Muscat being introduced as Mary Muscat’s brother. You never needed him to be defined by a woman in his life.
Mary Muscat is a lawyer, a former police officer, a campaigner for disabled children, a competent public commenter, and now a general election candidate. None of these qualities went in the headlines introducing her as a politician. Instead, we were introduced to her as a factor of a man in her life, her nasty brother.
I’m not writing because this might have been offensive to her. She can speak for herself and from what I know of her she needs no defending, especially defending by another man.
I am writing because it needs to be said. Whether we want to or not, whether we are conscious of doing it or not, we still think and measure women as functions and extensions of the men in their lives. A woman is less a person than she is someone’s wife, daughter, even sister of the greater man she is measured against.
The point in this case is even more manifest. Mary Muscat has been measured against a man who is the pits and inevitably, and utterly unfairly, she’s dragged down with him.
It is not a sufficient excuse that as a matter of fact it is true that she is her brother’s sister. What must be considered is whether that fact is relevant at all to the news that she is an election candidate. It isn’t, except to disqualify her for reasons she cannot in a fair world be held accountable for.
We should know better.