@Setanta,
Yes--but "civil partnership" avails of all those rights if legislated for.
It is the insistence on the use of the term "marriage" to dignify or to villify, as the case may be, a homosexual relationship which is the bone of the contention.
Like Theocritus, and many another in a long and much esteemed tradition, your writings, when shaken, stirred, strained, boiled dry, and examined under an eyeglass, add up to not much more than "sometimes it rains and sometimes the sun shines" or occasionally, as a variant, "sometimes it pisses it down" or somesuch. "Snows" for example.
But what are we to think about an institution with the eminence of the British House of Commons, which has ordered the fate of millions of souls in peace and in war, deigning to spend time, exceedingly expensive time, on such sordid matters as these which have been foisted upon the nation by a vociferous minority taking advantage of Media's desperate need to salivate and slurp over fumblings in underpants, and other activities which no respectable person would allow the imagination to contemplate, and to justify the life-styles of those members of the minority who have managed, mysteriously, to penetrate to its very heart, if Media could be said to have such an organ.
And taking advantage also of a significant concession having been made at a point in history when such a concession was inevitable. As if the one concession justifies clamouring for more and which, if granted, will lead to even more demands such as uni-sex toilets and equal opportunity brothels and chaps turning up to view the golf championship in clothes something of the genre of Lola's previous avatar. Or excavation equipment operatives turning up in her present one.
Why should actors, curates of the C of E and tailor's assistants have all the fun?
