Gay Marriage?

Dear Editor,

I could not agree more with your correspondent who said the other day that we need to stop talking about ‘genders’ and go back to talking about ‘sexes’, but to do so would not on its own get us out of the self-contradictions he says we are caught in. There are other, related causes, especially the state’s supposition that if it passes a law licensing homomsexual marriage … Hey presto! … homosexual marriage is thereby brought into existence and made real. What the law has the power to make real is only the licence, not the marriage. Whereas the giving and taking in marriage has a character independent of the law, ‘homosexual marriage’ depends on it. And, as it is a constitutional commonplace that one Parliament cannot bind another, another could change the law, back, and withdraw the right to the licence … and what happens to ‘homosexual marriage’ then? It disappears into the dustbin of History. And, as your correspondent suggests, the unreality of the thing is betrayed by the self-contradictory way we try to talk of it … a thought which prompts, in verse, the following question about one of our national treasures, presently performing at Glastonbury:

If Mr David Furnish
Is the wedded husband
Of Sir Elton John,
As, any day, on the news,
You may hear he is,
Or read he is
At any time of day or night
In Wikipedia,
What else can Sir Elton be
But the wedded wife
Of Mr David Furnish?
And if so,
Why is he not
Dame Elton John?

Yours faithfully

Henrietta Daly (Mrs)