Much ado

The American political scientist Wallace Sayre said that the bitterness of a political debate was inversely proportional to its importance. This has been true for US politics, where at each election time the issue of gay marriage divides the country — even when the president has no authority to either legalise or ban it. It’s all about sending messages and expressing values. This murky, often hysterical form of campaigning has largely been absent from British politics — until David Cameron, that is.

The Prime Minister’s decision to legalise gay marriage has, from the off, been more about political positioning than equality. He has created a fuss which is, as Sayre would have predicted, out of all proportion to what is at stake. The pot has been stirred. One hundred thousand responses have been sent to the Home Office’s consultation on the subject and more than 500,000 have signed the Coalition for Marriage’s petition, which shows the ability of the gay marriage agenda still to upset a great many people.