This post incorporates a few paragraphs from an earlier one, published here, about gay fatherhood. It originally appeared as a Blottr column (read it there).

No one would choose to be gay. You’d have to be mad. It’s almost the perfect recipe for misery. Just look around you: the feelings of alienation and rejection it engenders are responsible for the sorts of repugnant tribal posturing you see on the streets of Soho on a Friday night, as bitterly unhappy queers engage in degrading and repulsive behaviour, because they want to feel a part of something after a lifetime of marginalisation; the empty, pointless, vacuous, self-destructive behaviour that religious types are so often ridiculed for calling out.

Gay men, at heart, see themselves as faulty, so they exaggerate their imperfections in the company of others they see as similarly defective. Ironically, it’s precisely that profound feeling of being somehow broken by it that means a gay man’s sexuality often comes to be the defining characteristic of his personality. Really, you wouldn’t wish such a harsh sentence on anyone. Hardly a sound basis for a sacred union under God, is it?

And yet gay marriage is on the news agenda again, because the Government has launched a consultation on making it legal by 2015. The word “consultation” is only being used in its loosest sense, as the decision appears to have been made already. At the risk of coming across as hyperbolic: why is no one pointing out what an offensive parody of a precious institution gay marriage would be?Brendan O’Neill writes brilliantly today in the Telegraph about just how vacuous and pointless gay culture often is, reminding us of Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay in which she observes that the stylisation and love of artifice so revelled in by metropolitan elites predicates style over substance, threatening to rob culture and society of meaningfulness. It poisons much of what it touches.

Sontag’s essay resonates particularly strongly today: there’s a view, promulgated by the socially liberal media and extremists on the benches of the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, that almost any lifestyle choice is alright now. It chimes with, and to some degree emerges from, that vacuous milieu of bien pensant chat show psychology that says everything’s OK, as long as you’re OK with it.

Encouraging this sort of behaviour by creating an institution to circumscribe it runs the risk of endorsing, in a glib and postmodernish sort of way, miserable life choices that only serve to underscore what has been lost by imitating heterosexual institutions instead of complementing them. We ought to be showing people attracted to others of the same sex that there is a better way to conduct themselves than giving in to the grotesque excesses of so-called “gay culture”; one of burlesque and parody. We ought to be creating a parallel recognition for unions, surely. Oh, wait. We have.

Institutionalising gay marriage also presumes that the relationship between a man and man is fundamentally the same as that between a man and a woman. Nothing could be further from the truth. It isn’t just the biological incapacity for procreation; relationships between men are predicated on an entirely different set of needs, assumptions and compromises than those of straight couples.

To extend Sontag’s terminology, Britain today, so long in hock to the loonies on the Left, has allowed a sort of “camp morality” to take hold: ethical positions more concerned with demonstrating to the world what a nice bloke you are than developing a coherent and decent moral standing. The consequences for our children and our society are incalculable. So permissive has our society become, and so “relativistic” its values, that we are now seeing horrors like this: last week, the Mail reported on a mother who is sending her boy, aged 10, to school dressed as a girl. (With the school’s permission, if you can believe that.)

How can this child possibly have the faintest clue who or what he is? Yet his parents, in deference to the Oprah Winfrey milieu of moral relativism, are permanently damaging the young man’s mental health and his prospects of a healthy and happy life by codifying his cry for attention as “who he is”. What if “who he is” turned out to be a murderer? A rapist? A paedophile? Would his mother keep the engine ticking over while he hacked a few old ladies to death?

Why did the school go along with this terrible decision? Does the mother not realise what a horribly tormented identity crisis she is leading her child into? Where is the outrage? (A word that has itself now been appropriated by homosexual rights campaigners – as if they have anything to be indignant about any more.)

If this were one of those “curiosities” in the press, we might be able to dismiss it. And yet, just this morning, we are told that Britain is preparing for “genderless passports” to “spare the feelings of transgender people”. This is madness. We are a constitutionally Christian country with Christian values. Many people will be asking why we are bending over backwards to cater for the slightest whims of people who have purposefully, and, more often than not, at our expense, disfigured their bodies, in the name of that hydra-headed nonsense, “equality”.

Marriage is an issue on which we should take an unashamedly absolutist moral stand.

All the research shows that children brought up in traditional, married nuclear families are more well-adjusted, prosperous, healthy and happy. So why aren’t we out there defending the institution from these ugly distortions? There are few areas of public life that remain the exclusive province of religion – to the shame and detriment of our society, as the moral decay which found expression in rioting and looting recently demonstrated. So it is time for us to be sterner with these noisy minority groups. They have gone too far, and should back their glittery day-glo tanks off our lawn.

Civil partnership exists to enshrine in law the rights and responsibilities of marriage to same-sex couples. It is a tolerable concession to the rights of those groups, but the law should go no further. Because marriage isn’t just the latest “obstacle” for these radical campaigners to smash in their Sisyphean quest for “fairness”. It is our foundation; the basis on which faith is built and the cohesive glue that has held British society together for centuries.

Pope Benedict XVI has repeatedly and insistently warned against the dangers of relativism. He has also, specifically, described gay marriage as an “insidious” threat to society. Famous sporting heroes in America have been brave enough to warn that it will lead us into “anarchy”. More and more people are speaking out, but our political classes are acting deaf.

Christopher Hitchens once wrote that the demand for gay marriage “demonstrates the spread of conservatism, not radicalism, among gays.” We can be grateful, at least, for that. But will their newfound common sense be enough to save them, and us, from destructive and damaging legislation?

Who is really demanding gay marriage, and why, when civil partnerships already provide all the public recognition and legal rights a gay couple could want? Anyone besides loud-mouthed extremists like Peter Tatchell?

The truth is, nothing and no one will be served by making gay marriage legal than the egos of extremist lunatics and the defenders of a crass and repugnant gay culture that does immeasurable harm to young gay people. And in throwing away the special status that marriage deserves, we will be diluting and devaluing the bedrock of society. And that’s not hyperbole.