In speaking thus, Lord Hope was not really saying anything in his legal capacity at all. He was simply expressing the ruling orthodoxy of our time. The same orthodoxy explains why David Cameron makes support for gay marriage a matter of party policy and why the BBC reports the Gay Pride march (in which, its website preposterously claimed, “an estimated one million people took part”) as if it were Trooping the Colour. It lies behind the claim, made in advance of the Pope’s visit to Britain to beatify Cardinal Newman, that Newman’s wish to be buried with his closest friend, Fr Ambrose St John, proves that he must have been gay, too. Poor old Newman, is the idea: if he had been allowed to manifest his sexuality in the way Lord Hope approves, he wouldn’t have been a silly old saint, he would have been out with the Gay Priders, dressed only in angel’s wings and tight leather pants.