I hate to rain on this fabulous parade, but there's a massive problem with this happy-clappy rallying cry. And it's this: everywhere gay marriage has been introduced it has battered freedom, not boosted it. Debate has been chilled, dissenters harried, critics tear-gassed. Love and marriage might go together like horse and carriage, but freedom and gay marriage certainly do not.

Prince Charles' sensibilities are clearly similar to those of his mother who, as heir to the throne, set out the enduring themes for her life in 1947. As Princess Elizabeth she was on a tour of South Africa with her family when, on her twenty-first birthday, she made a speech broadcast by radio dedicating her life to the service of the Commonwealth.

Male and female are bonded concepts, in that John can know himself to be a male only by knowing a female to be female. Regardless of John's thoughts or feelings, he exists in the form of a relational object: his body points towards another; Joan's body points towards another; therefore John's body is a form of otherness. Our body, then, has a sexual orientation - 'other-sexed'.

When we consider, even in the animal kingdom, how much effort and energy the coming together of male and female takes, in terms of displays, courtship rituals, rivalries and violence, it is astonishing that sexual reproduction ever happened at all. Biologists are still not quite sure why it did. Some say to offer protection against parasites, or immunities against disease. Others say it's simply that the meeting of opposites generates diversity.