IT'S NOT FEAR, IT'S JUDGEMENT:

Gay marriage is not a core issue of civil or human rights. We know this because it did not cross the minds of the great thinkers who devoted their lives to considering civil and human rights systematically: Frederick Douglass, Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King junior. It was only in the mid-1990s, in Hawaii and elsewhere, that gay marriage became a public cause. The activists who sought it were often viewed as curiosities more than politicians. Their views have since swept the world. In 2004, Britain passed a Civil Partnership Act that accorded gay couples all the practical rights of marriage; but clearly the right to call these partnerships marriages, of equal standing, is all-important. The government is in transition from enforcing tolerance of homosexuality (an expansion of citizenship) to enforcing approval of it (an expansion of censorship).

For refusing to place life-long homosexual relations on the same moral plane as heterosexual ones, the Church of England has been accused by the gay-rights group Stonewall of holding "a masterclass in melodramatic scaremongering". This point makes some superficial sense. On one hand, you have a 2,000-year-old faith as professed by a 500-year-old Church that for centuries set the moral tone of the world, from Putney to Punjab. On the other, you have a 15-year-old lobby, representing what may yet turn out to be an ideological fad.

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