It's their party

America seems very het up about the issue of 'gay marriage', and at risk of sounding egotistical I don't really see why this is the big, confusing, angry mess it's gt to be.

There are three meanings to what you or I or George mean when we say 'marriage', and it's mixing up those meanings that causes so much confusion on the issue. There's the emotional, lifestyle sense of the word: what you might like to think of as being "really" married. Let's call it Love for short. Then you have the legal, taxation sense which we'll call Partnership. And then, and this is where all the controversy starts, you have the religious sense of Matrimony, involving vows and priests and so forth.

The issue of homosexual "marriage" is almost entirely a question of people in Love seeking legal Partnership- and with good reason. There's a whole panoply of rights that legal recognition of a partnership bestows, from tax cuts to the right to visit your other half in emergency wards. It's self-evident that those rights are due to people who love each other, regardless of the details of who has what chromosomes. Homosexuals in love and heterosexuals in love are no different. Everyone has the right to have their partnership legally recognised.

With that established, I'm now going to say something that sounds controversial.

Churches are under absolutely no obligation to marry homosexuals.

A church is a group of private citizens and we can no more compel it to extend it's matrimony ceremonies to gay couples than we can compel it to marry white folks to niggers, or compel it to ordain atheists. A church is allowed to do whatever it wants.

That cuts both ways: no one church or group thereof can then pretend to have a monopoly on Partnership. Maybe it can teach it has a monopoly on Matrimony, but that's it's own business. There are any number of incompatible Matrimonies on the market. It can withhold Matrimony all it likes, so long as it recognises that in the eyes of everyone else they can still have a valid marriage.

Here in Britain, ministers of the church of England can conduct legal marriages, but Sikh temples cannot. That's wrong, to my mind: either no religion can do the legal footwork for a Partnership, or any can and that includes one of Britain's thousands of Wiccan Priestesses. Take your pick, but don't confuse the right to legal partnership with the tangled web of getting, granting or wanting matrimony.

when I am king, you will be first against the wall