Dogma, pedagogy and helicopters.

It's been that long, I realise, since I wrote anything on these pages that it must have seemed like I'd given it up forever. It becomes an easy habit to break, this, and with every week that passes without a new entry, a harder one to re-establish. The longer it goes without an entry, the better it's got to be when it does finally reappear, right? At least that's how it feels from this end.

So, finally dipping my fingers back into the murky waters of the typing pool, you'll forgive me, I hope, if this one falls rather short of the standard that might be expected after a five-month hiatus, for that is what it's been. (I genuinely hadn't realised it had gone that long).

So, comment on general election to come. Clegg's tears, Miliband's rather startled realisation that his brother should have got the job all along, and Farage's defeat will no doubt feature. See if you can guess, before I write that entry, which one of those three things gave me the most pleasure. In the meantime, a bit of comment on what Danny Baker might call the Iron Horse of this blog, the good old Catholic Church.

I've had the very good fortune these past couple of weekends to head out to Spain for each of them. It may seem a bit la-di-dah jet set to fly out on a Friday, back on a Monday, out again on a Thursday and back once more on the Monday, but that's how it fell. First for a wedding, then for a birthday celebration. I've written on here before about Spanish weddings, I think - their length compared to the British ceremonies I've attended, never having to pay for a drink at the reception, the very Spanish music partnered by dancing late into the night. Then there's just how, well, Catholic the actual ceremony is. This usually includes a sermon, in both senses of the word, and the one delivered by the priest administering the wedding I attended a couple of Saturdays back was an absolute doozy.

I usually hear my girlfriend, a fervent atheist brought up in a Catholic country, muttering in quiet disagreement during these ceremonies as the priests do their thing. On this occasion, though, she actually felt moved to get up and leave the church mid-way through the thing, ostensibly to assist a mum with one of her two babies, who'd started fussing a bit - who can blame them? - but really to cool her anger at what she was hearing. My Spanish has not come on sufficiently to follow everything said at these occasions, especially when it's punctuated by the typical call-and-response refrain of the church's own peculiar argot.

Her later explanation was that the priest had had a bit of a go at parents who leave it to teachers to educate their kids. Teachers, he'd explained, merely teach. They can't educate - only the Church, through their parents, can do that. So all this stuff the schools fill kids' heads with can't be allowed to take root as incredulity, as questioning, lest they veer from the perfect truth of the Church. As a former teacher, this was basically the perfect storm for her, so out she bailed, for a while at least.

All ended well, though. They got married, there was dancing, and I got completely shit-faced because a) the bar's free, remember, and b) you always forget they don't bother with measures like we do, so you're getting at least a treble every time you order a short. The hotel room was doing the helicopter thing when I crashed into bed at who-knows-what hour of Sunday morning, knowing I had to be back at work Monday afternoon and recovery time was therefore short.

This weekend just passed, however, was completely different. I got completely shit-faced at a birthday party instead, and the spare room of the house I was staying in was doing the helicopter thing as I crashed into bed at who-knows-what hour of Sunday morning, knowing I had to be back at work... you get the idea.

What did I learn from these occasions? Well, it might be a good idea to get wasted before any subsequent wedding ceremony I attend out there. The church may do the helicopter thing while the nuptials are going on, but I've noticed that my confidence in my Spanish is correlative with the amount of alcohol I've consumed. So have a few early doors and I'd at least think I could understand the sermon sufficiently to understand what my missus is muttering about as she stands next to me.

Taking their ball away

The Church of England, with its response to proposals to legalise same-sex marriage, has shown once again that it is a very long way from modernising. They've behaved rather like a kid threatening to remove his football from the field if the game is not played in exactly the way he wants, by claiming that if they were 'forced' to conduct gay weddings, it would be "impossible for the Church of England to continue its role conducting marriages on behalf of the State".

Make us do it and we'll split from the State so we're no longer the 'official' wedding provider, this is saying. Well, not only is this a ludicrous overstatement of the 'dangers' facing the Church, of which more in a sec, but if I had my way their bluff would be called. Since they're already legally obliged to offer weddings to any UK resident regardless of their religious affiliation, but routinely refuse to conduct re-marriages, for example, how exactly would their role be any different from now, other than in being more inclusive? They don't worry about legal challenges from divorcees who want to marry again, but they do worry about legal challenges from gay people?

They talk about the erosion of the old values of marriage when they should be happy that there are people out there who still want to commit to such an institution at a time when divorce is on the rise and the number of weddings not far above its historic low. Obviously these are just not the right kind of people for them.

For me, they should be allowed to take their ball and told to sod off. Since three quarters of weddings in the UK do not take place in a church anyway, and I believe strongly that the Church should play no role in government in any form, what's to be lost by completely 'divorcing' Church and State in this case? There are plenty of modernist people within the Church who could conduct a ceremony with religious content for those who want it, and plenty of beautiful locations to hold those ceremonies which are not owned by the Church – it doesn't have to be within the four walls of a CofE building. Whether they'd be prepared to leave the CofE to protect the rights of gay people to marry is another matter, of course, but I'm quite sure society, and the concept of marriage, would survive without the Church.

If the law is changed, that only leaves one thing to be sorted out for genuine equality in this area in Britain, which is the right for heterosexual people to commit to a civil partnership rather than a marriage. Surely, in search of equality, this has to come eventually as well.