EXTRACT: Such objections to gay marriage are based on nothing more than good, old-fashioned homophobia - whether sanctified by god or not. Whilst David Cameron may be a new man who likes gays and the environment, the Tory Party he just happens to lead is still the “nasty party” that Theresa May described and warned about in 2002 - still “unrepentant, just plain unattractive”. And the gay marriage vote gruesomely showed that not much has changed over the last 10 years. No wonder Tory modernisers and reformers were horrified by the speeches given by anti-gay marriage MPs - one unnamed minister telling The Guardian that “with the help of four or five speeches we have been taken back more than 50 years to the horrors of the 1950s” (February 6).
Curiously, good Christian MPs, yes like Roger Gale, made the repeated assertion that marriage is the “union between one man and one woman” - simple as that. Look it up in the Bible. But, according to that book, Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines - the only wife mentioned by name is Naamah, who apparently was the mother of Solomon’s successor, Rehoboam (1 Kings 11:1-3). And, for the record, king David also had many wives, though the exact number is contested. Other such examples abound in the Bible. This led Edward Gibbon in The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire to waggishly note that Mohammed, by comparison to Solomon, was extremely modest - he only had 14 wives. Nor does the New testament, for that matter, explicitly say anywhere that marriage has to be a union between “one man and one woman”, or for life.
Not only are Christian Tory opponents of gay marriage obnoxious bigots: theologically speaking, they are up a gum tree too.
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