Gay marriage is going to happen, and that’s a fact

I know this will surprise you, given the shy and retiring violets who largely write in these pages, but one of the main problems with being a columnist is the rampaging ego. In my own case, this manifests not in drunken debauchery or unabashed priapism (which is a shame as both sound fun) but in a naive and quite self-obsessed assumption that people might have been keeping track of what I’ve written about things, regardless of where I’ve done so.

Hence my mistake. Two weeks ago, here, I made an offhand reference to supporting gay marriage. Since then, I’ve had a handful of letters, a few emails, and an actual face-to-face bollocking from a very nice lady at a ‘meet the readers’ Spectator tea party. Combined, they left me pondering that, although I’ve already argued the case in the Times six months ago, it’s perfectly possible that readers here won’t realise how cleverly I did so. As I cannot bear this (see above, re: the ego), I’m going to do it again. Drop me an email if you also read the last one, and I’ll send you a few funny paragraphs about something else. George Osborne and trains, maybe. I’m all over that.

The only real argument against gay marriage is the Christian one. I didn’t realise that at first, because Christians were shielding their motivation behind lots of guff about nature and bigamy, but it’s pretty obvious now. I struggle with exactly why the loving Christian god would so object to gay marriage, but I daresay these people have given it some thought, and I’m unlikely to change their minds. Crucially, though, their minds do not need to be changed. They simply need to accept the unstoppable logic of the argument that their beliefs deserve no agency over anybody else.