Well, Christoffersen was a manager at El Coyote, the Beverly Boulevard landmark restaurant that's always had throngs of customers waiting to get inside. Many of them were gay, and Christoffersen, a devout Mormon, donated $100 in support of Proposition 8, the successful November ballot initiative that banned gay marriage.

My three-year-old daughter was taken to see a different Santa recently, a more rural Santa, who had set up base on some farm complex which at other times of the year sold bourgeois organic produce to people who have got the hell out of London recently. It was brilliant, she said, when she got back, before begging to watch Wonder Pets on TV. My wife took her.

Among the likeliest effects of gay marriage is to take us down a slippery slope to legalized polygamy and "polyamory" (group marriage). Marriage will be transformed into a variety of relationship contracts, linking two, three, or more individuals (however weakly and temporarily) in every conceivable combination of male and female. A scare scenario? Hardly. The bottom of this slope is visible from where we stand. Advocacy of legalized polygamy is growing.

In Orthodoxy, Chesterton broke new ground in apologetics. Rather than writing a serious tome on strictly religious questions, he careered through topics as diverse as lunatic asylums and fairy tales, drawing in the arts, intuition, emotion and imagination as witnesses for the Faith, and so demonstrating that rather than being dull and stifling, Christianity is itself 'The Eternal Revolution.'