The Church of England is worried and upset about government proposals to legalise gay marriage, saying these plans might come between it and its dearly beloved the state.
The church — whose supreme governor is Queen Elizabeth II — warned that it could be forced out of its traditional role of conducting weddings on behalf of the state.
Well we can’t have that. We can’t have the established church – whose top person is the monarch – being “forced” out of its traditional role. We can’t ever have anybody or any institution, however archaic and useless, forced out of a traditional role. Everybody knows that traditional roles are the best things ever, and must always be preserved and protected from change and reform.
“The Church of England’s unique place in the current marriage law of England means that the proposals will potentially have a very significant impact on our ability to serve the people of the nation as we have always done,” it added.
It said the plan “fails to take account of the fact that consummation has always been an integral part of the common understanding of marriage between church and state, with annulment possible where consummation does not occur.”
Whut? Consummation? What’s that got to do with anything? No wait, I get it – when it’s straight marriage, they can check for consummation by looking for blood on the sheet. With gay marriage that won’t work.
No, wait, that won’t work, because actually you don’t find the vicar who performed the marriage on the doorstep the next morning, ready to inspect the sheet. You used to, yes, but not any more – that’s one of those traditional roles that have faded away over time. Pause to shed a tear over another traditional role destroyed by our frivolous secular ways.
So that’s not it, so what is it? That “consummation” is a word that applies only to straight couples so that even if there’s no way to verify that a marriage has or has not been consummated, the fact that it doesn’t apply to gay couples makes the church superfluous? Is that it?
Surely not. Surely they can’t be that silly.
Can they?