The New Game Sweeping The Nation

Just because today's vote in Westminster coming out solidly in favour of gay marriage wasn't much of a surprise, it doesn't mean we can't rub the Tories' faces in the bubbling effluence of their cultural irrelevance. 

And what better way to do it than to play my new game: "Coward or C**t"?  The rules are very simple.  I'll give you a comment made by a Tory in today's pre-vote debate, and you decide: is the speaker a coward or a c**t?

Here's an easy one to get us started. Edward Leigh, for Gainsborough:

We should be in the business of protecting cherished institutions and our cultural heritage otherwise what, I ask, is a Conservative party for?

Points for honesty, at least. What, indeed, is the Conservative Party for, if not to cling to the memory of a bygone golden age that, to the extent it existed at all, only did so for rich white straight guys.

Next up: Sir Roger Gale:

I do not subscribe to it myself but I recognise the merit in the argument, and that is this; if the government is serious about this, take it away, abolish the civil partnerships bill, abolish civil marriage, and create a civil union bill that applies to all people, irrespective of their sexuality or their relationships, and that means brother and brothers, sisters and sisters and brothers and sisters as well. 

Shorter Gale: I'm not saying it'd be a good idea to downgrade atheists' marriages and legalise incestuous union. I'm just saying that's better than letting gays marry.

How about Nadine Dorris? She calls in to let us know:

In a heterosexual marriage a couple can divorce for adultery, and adultery is if you have sex with a member of the opposite sex. In a heterosexual marriage a couple vow to forsake all others ... A gay couple have no obligation to make that vow [to faithfulness] because they do not have to forsake all others because they cannot divorce for adultery. There is no requirement of faithfulness. And if there is no requirement of faithfulness, what is a marriage? 

In truth, it genuinely is problematic that the law only recognises marital infidelity if it crosses gender lines.  So, clearly, the only solution to this problem is to forbid people of the same gender to marry.  If only MPs had the collective ability to modify and repeal law.

Peter Bone, for Wellinborough (for whom this is the saddest day of his life, apparently):

Why should all of us, with our individual consequences, decide how this matter is determined? Why is my view, or the leader of my party’s, more important than the person in the Dog and Duck? Why don’t we put this off to 2017, and then all of the nation can decide on it, not just here tonight?

Translation: nothing makes me sadder than the idea that minorities might be granted rights before the majority is generously prepared to hand them over.

Cheryl Gillan, former Welsh secretary, as described by the Guardian's Andrew Sparrow:

[Gillan] said that more people would support the bill if they were certain that religious freedoms were protected But she said she was concerned on this point. "With great sadness" she would be voting against the bill, she said.

Shorter Gillan: the only way to protect religious freedom is to insist it continues to be illegal for the Quakers to marry single-sex couples.

What do we think, people?  Is this miserable parade of fools and liars simply too afraid of voter backlash to admit their own talking points are pure bull?  Or are they so chock-full of their own magnificent cuntiness that they can't hear themselves spew idiocy over the background hum of their maggot-ridden viciousness.

(Alas, I seem to misplaced my favourite comment of the bunch, in which an MP argued too much time had been taken away from "more important" matters in debating this bill, and they would therefore vote no, because if you don't want an issue to take up time the best thing to do is guarantee it's revisited again in a couple of years.)