Marriage: Revolting

'So how is disgust supposed to relate to moral harm? Because it is perceived to be an indicator of what is bad. Most who study disgust give it an evolutionary function. Disgust represents a fear of contamination. And a great many traditional social boundaries and taboos exist as a way of protecting against contamination. The anthropologist Mary Douglas famously argued that the desire for purity and cleanliness is all about organising offensive things into acceptable social spaces – a place for everything and everything in its place. But the problem with a moral instinct that's all about policing the social boundaries created by disgust is that the sources of disgust are often the very same things that make us human. Cardinal O'Brien, for instance, is filled with disgust at the thought of gay sex. Which is why he is so intent on maintaining the boundaries of traditional marriage. But what a great many of us see in the Catholic church's response to homosexuality is simply a refusal of love itself – more specifically, love in all its sticky, squelchy reality...'

Dr Giles Fraser, the former canon chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, writing in The Guardian on the politics of revulsion, and drawing a link between opposition to the Occupy movement and the anti-gay marriage brigade.
(Also the subject of a Guardian editorial today).
And the Rev Richard Coles, the former Communard, wrote this - 'The God-given dignity to which the Cardinal is blind' - in The Independent on Monday.
So I guess them Christians ain't all bad.

• Meanwhile over at the Daily Mail it's still bobbins o'clock. I think this writer's correct in saying that hardly anyone gives a hoot about gay marriage - so why does the press devote so much space to it? And so why not bring it in?