Fifty years ago, homosexuality was outside the law, the legal punishment imprisonment, the social punishment disgrace. To be caught in flagrante was to end a man’s career, to ruin him and sully his family. The generous, class-changing Swinging Sixties witnessed both the most spitefully destructive trials and the first tentative moves towards homosexual equality.

Change has been slow, opposed not only by church and state (MPs often the most vociferous) but by a wider society in which ignorance and prejudice have been entrenched. The first modifications of the law were of a kind with Shylock’s permitted pound of flesh but not a drop of blood, a trap, ungenerous — homosexuals were allowed to have sexual contacts but not to make them (that was importuning).

But with every whittling away at the law, the pace of change increased, and in the past two decades, particularly with the institution of civil partnerships, homosexuals have rights almost equal to heterosexuals. They may live openly together, join the armed forces, even become priests and politicians.

They may inherit each other’s property exactly as may a man and his wife, and may even adopt children — this last a remarkable concession, for it implies homosexuals are no longer bundled together with paedophiles, rapists and others perceived to be deviants. Is this not enough?

Apparently not. Homosexuals — I suspect very few — now demand gay marriage. Marriage is much more than the opportunity for dressing in old-fashioned clothes and whooping it up after an arcane ceremony in a pretty church. Marriage in Christian Europe has for nearly a millennium been categorised as one of the Seven Sacraments, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace … ordained by Christ himself”.

Let me put it in the context of the other sacraments — baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, absolution, extreme unction and ordination — for then the purely spiritual element is more obvious. Let me use the alternative word for it — matrimony — and its status as sacramental is reinforced.

Let us consider the Solemnisation of Matrimony in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer dating back to 1552 or so. Holy Matrimony, it declares, was primarily “ordained for the procreation of children to be brought up in the fear and nature of the Lord”. It could not be clearer. Suddenly the Latin origin comes into play — a derivation from mater, mother, matrimony the sacramental licence to make a mother of a girl — and the idea of two men in a marriage is immediately preposterous.

Marriage or holy matrimony is to those of a Christian faith that is far more securely founded than on only the annual jollity of a midnight mass more than just a word. It is an age-old theological concept, one of many, all interlinked.

Must the Catholic Church be compelled by ignorant politicians and hoi polloi to share this sacramental term with homosexuals? I am as queer as any of them but I do not much care for my brethren in crass, demanding mood. By all means dress in ridiculous togs, exchange rings and kisses, guzzle Laurent Perrier, bake a cake and dance the night away, but call it a wedding, an Old English term of even older German origin, with nothing theological about it — and leave marriage to those who still believe in its sanctity.