"We cannot afford to indulge this madness."

A headline I read at Memeorandum, and clicked on without knowing the actual subject. In the fraction of a second while I waited for the webpage to appear, I guessed Iran. Iran and its nuclear aspirations. I was wrong.

I'm confronted with a photograph of Elton John, waving at us alongside his civil partner David Furnish. It's illustrates an opinion piece by Cardinal Keith O'Brien, "Britain's most senior Catholic":

But can we simply redefine terms at a whim? Can a word whose meaning has been clearly understood in every society throughout history suddenly be changed to mean something else?

If same-sex marriage is enacted into law what will happen to the teacher who wants to tell pupils that marriage can only mean – and has only ever meant – the union of a man and a woman?

Will that teacher’s right to hold and teach this view be respected or will it be removed? Will both teacher and pupils simply become the next victims of the tyranny of tolerance, heretics, whose dissent from state-imposed orthodoxy must be crushed at all costs?...

As an institution, marriage long predates the existence of any state or government. It was not created by governments and should not be changed by them. Instead, recognising the innumerable benefits which marriage brings to society, they should act to protect and uphold marriage, not attack or dismantle it.

This is a point of view that would have been endorsed and accepted only a few years ago, yet today advancing a traditional understanding of marriage risks one being labelled an intolerant bigot....

This brings us to the one perspective which seems to be completely lost or ignored: the point of view of the child. All children deserve to begin life with a mother and father; the evidence in favour of the stability and well-being which this provides is overwhelming and unequivocal. It cannot be provided by a same-sex couple, however well-intentioned they may be.

It cannot? He frets about being labelled an intolerant bigot, but then he says things that sound intolerably bigoted. He really does want to control what words mean, but that is not how language works. And he wants to control language while simultaneously expressing fear that other people will control language. You just can't have that much, Your Eminence.

Disingenuously, the Government has suggested that same-sex marriage wouldn’t be compulsory and churches could choose to opt out. This is staggeringly arrogant.

No Government has the moral authority to dismantle the universally understood meaning of marriage.

Imagine for a moment that the Government had decided to legalise slavery but assured us that “no one will be forced to keep a slave”.

Put that in the annals of bad analogies!