ENGLISH SEX

Today, 5 February 2013, the UK’s elected representatives, Members of Parliament, sitting in the House of Commons, under the symbolic tower of Big Ben (size does matter), will have a free vote – free of Party dictates – on Same Sex Marriage. As all Americans know, the English are a peculiar lot when it comes to sex; and from our side, we are indeed deeply confused by it all.  The near bankrupt UK can no longer afford to include sex-education or guidance in our schools, but, having six-hundred mature members probe sex and marriage in Parliament, will at last give birth to clear moral and sexual leadership for the British. 

How, in writing this, can we avoid double-entendres, crass vulgarity and embarrassing innuendo? With great difficulty, I suspect.  We will just have to skirt around the delicate issues. Firstly, it would be more accurate to call it Same Gender Marriage not Same Sex – as the sex is likely to be infinitely varied while the genders are definitively limited to just three.

Mass Debating

From the 600 Members in the House, the Act will pass to The 500 Lords (in another House), who include Ladies (but not gentlemen) and all the Bishops of The Church of England or Anglican Church, frocked or unfrocked; for further debate. And, because there are many of them, it is called mass debating. (Sorry about that, the joke has tacitly amused me since puberty; matched only by the James Bond film joke about cunning linguists; which definitely should not be inserted here). One of the consequences of the Same Sex Marriage Act will be to add fuel to the passionate Ecumenical arguments about appointing Women Bishops, and cohabitating Homosexual but Celibate Bishops that have raged for years – for two-thousand years according to some debaters.

BISHOPS - GAY - FEMALE?

British radio, television and newspaper journalists are excitedly obsessed by, even tumescent and engorged by contemplating the moral, ethical, spiritual, religious, Biblical, sinful, saintly, legal, political, fiscal, commercial, health, family, human, inhuman, alien, personal, inheritance, socio-economic, paternity, maternity - and the mind bending, gymnastic, physical imagery, which is unspoken but lurks under the covers at all times – issues of this biggest of all questions. 

A major conundrum – that raised its bewildered hot little head on the BBC this morning, when a male Member objector to Same Sex Marriage took the microphone from an enthusiastic, self-outed Political Lesbian Anglican Minister (of politics) – is …Can a Same Sex Marriage be Consummated? And if so, …then How? To what end? (…move quickly on). And, if not consummated in the time honoured meaning of that term, then… can it be a legal marriage? This fundamental breeding issue raises so many unwelcome intimate images of what may be happening in the nation’s Bishoprics, while congregations are bent in prayers and holy music, that we have every good excuse to disengage.

The question boils down to: Who is permitted to do What to Whom, When and With What Anatomical or Prosthetic Parts, for How Long? It is so bewildering that we and our elected (sp.) members should perhaps withdraw, even prematurely, and leave it all to God to decide – on Judgement Day. Like the physicists’ irresolvable conundrum of what happened before the Big-Bang, matters such as these can only be left in God’s capable hands.  

SEX AND SIN EXPLAINED