gay marriage

I was fairly indifferent to the idea of gay marriage ('Who cares?', as Boy George said on 10 O'Clock Live) until I saw a full-page ad in the Telegraph (I got it free with Time Out, if you must know) exhorting the reader to add their name to a petition calling for marriage to be allowed to 'stay as it is'. Adorning it were lots of pictures of just-married couples exchanging gooey-eyed looks - none of them were Jordan and Peter Andre, I noticed - and the overall impression was of a creepy smugness so vast it made me want to support marriage between anything and everything - ants and people, people and vegetables, fish and trees - anything.

The anti-gay marriage guy on 10 O'Clock Live came out with that old chestnut about marriage being 'the glue that holds society together'. The argument seems to be that if you hand this glue to gay people they will make it less sticky somehow, perhaps by adding some specifically gay fluid to it. Or perhaps the argument is simply that if you give the glue to gays, there will be too much glue in circulation and everyone will get high on the fumes and say: 'Fuck marriage! Let's just have a massive orgy!'

I don't really know, but if they are worried about gays turning marriage into a camp, meaningless spectacle, they needn't be concerned - celebrities have already accomplished this.

As for 10 O'Clock Live, it gave me a startlingly novel idea - why not record the show beforehand and edit out the crap bits and embarrassed pauses? I think the technology to do that is available now.