There are times when it’s good to be away from the hurly-burly of American politics. Doubly so when the subject of gay marriage comes up. Here, for instance, is a story it is hard to imagine happening in the United States: Nick Herbert, the Conservative party’s Shadow Justice secretary has apparently become the second member of David Cameron’s Shadow Cabinet, to enter into a civil partnership. It’s hard to imagine too many senior gay Republicans feeling comfortable doing this, let alone doing so with the blessing of the party’s leader and their constituency assosciation.
Then again, gay marriage in Britain has, generally speaking, been decoupled from religion. (Of course, some would say that everything else in Britain has been, so why not marriage too). Now maybe American conservatives (of one degree of religiosity or another) are correct that this sort of thing heralds the end of everything, but if so it’s striking how relaxed their British counterparts, for the most part, are about this imminent descent to Sodom.
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