What’s the deal with British fags trying to get gay Americans to give up their quest for marriage equality? Mark Simpson, the gay who invented the word “metrosexuality” and the mainstream media’s go-to guy for post-gay rhetoric has an op-ed in today’s Guardian called “Let’s be civil: Gay people shouldn’t worry too much about Proposition 8. Marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

You know how Americans view the British as being all “Let’s not rock the boat too much, old chap! Throw the tea in the harbor? Heavens!”? Well, Mark Simpson isn’t doing much to change the perception:

“This one sees gay marriage so much as a touchstone as a fetish. A largely symbolic and emotional issue that in the US threatens to undermine real, non-symbolic same-sex couple protection: civil unions bestow in effect the same legal status as marriage in several US states – including California. As a result of the religious right’s mobilisation against gay marriage, civil unions have been rolled back in several US states.

Living as I do in the UK, where civil partnerships have been nationally recognised since 2004, perhaps I shouldn’t carp. But part of the reason that civil partnerships were successfully introduced here was because they are not “marriages”. At this point I’d like to hide behind the formidable figure of Sir Elton John, who also expressed doubts recently about the fixation of US gay campaigners on “gay marriage”, and declared he was happy to be in a civil partnership with the American David Furnish and did not want to get married.”

Yes, that’s who we should stand behind: That lion of intellectual heft and vigor, Sir Elton John.

These homosexual redcoats across the pond really don’t get it. Simpson goes on to argue that straight relationships and gay relationships aren’t really all that similar anyway, because in his experience “many if not most long term male-male relationships are very open indeed”, that most of his gay friends don’t want to have kids and that then he goes on to say that:

“I think it needs to be said amidst all this talk of gay domesticity that, important as it is to see lesbian and gay couples recognised and given legal protection probably most gay men (though not most lesbians) are single and probably will be single for most of their lives.”

So basically, because Mark Simpon’s friends are a bunch of sluts who can’t keep up a monogamous relationship, we don’t really need gay marriage. It never occurs to Simpson that the very fact that having these relationships are relegated to second-class status by the state may have something to do with why they aren’t enduring. It never occurs to Simpson that simply because marriage doesn’t appeal to him, it’s a fundamental civil right that is being denied to people who desire it. Maybe it’s simply the United States’ own history of civil rights that makes it such a clear case to Americans and such a “What’s the fuss?” thing to Brit’s like Simpson and Sir John.

Simpson derides the idea of ” the magical, symbolic power of gay marriage”, which is fine. There are lots of people who have no desire to get married. There are those who do believe that offering state-sanctioned marriage to one group of people and not another is a fundmental infringement on their rights. In California, gay people spent six months as full and equal citizens, only to have their rights taken from them. You’d think the British would learn by now that America’s big on the whole “liberty, justice and equality” thing.

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