Get the church out of the state, and the state will stay out of the church

So let us return, you and I, warily and wearily, to the topic of gay marriage. Gingerly, in fact, as though with a hangover after an ill-tempered, bickering party. And, in the cold and Nurofenned light of day, let us find our common ground, and think about where it leads.

I’m still for it and I’m still of the view that churches shouldn’t have to do it if they don’t want to. I’m for both of these things for the same reason, which is a belief that one person’s conviction, however firmly held, shouldn’t mess with another’s liberty and happiness unless it absolutely has to. In all honesty, though, I don’t consider them equal concerns. The right of gay people to marry, I reckon, is pretty fundamental and human. The right of people to keep practices they find icky out of their place of worship, meanwhile, has a morality I find more -slippery.

Indeed, I increasingly get the impression that religious opponents of gay marriage are actually secretly delighted at the notion that the Peter Tatchells of the world might seek to force gay marriages in churches, because it allows them to oppose something they would have opposed anyway out of sheer and shrill distaste, but to tell themselves their views are based on religious conscience.

Still, mine is not to make windows into men’s souls, as a lady once said. Faith is faith, and there’s something not quite right about assuming you can change it from parliament. Even though that lady’s father did just that.

Which is the rub, really, and it’s got me thinking. Refuse to recognise the equivalence of same and different sex unions in the rituals of your own private ontology which other people reckon is all make-believe anyway? Fine.