Simon Heffer is a columnist for the UK Daily Mail:

...anyone wishing to make the case against same-sex marriage must do so rationally. Calling its advocates rude names, or deriding their arguments, would simply weaken the case.

This view is plainly not shared by Lynne Featherstone, the Lib Dem MP who is Equalities Minister. She said the opposition expressed by prominent Christians to same-sex marriage was ‘homophobic’ and belonged in ‘the Dark Ages’. She singled out as ‘medieval’ the use of the term ‘heretic’ by a cleric to describe those advocating a change in the law.

Miss Featherstone said her own views were, by contrast, ‘progressive’ and the Government’s policy was ‘loving’.

Such blinkered intransigence — indeed, I would go so far as to call it bigotry — does not bode well for the free, pluralistic society that liberals claim to believe in. And it makes a mockery of their much-vaunted virtue of ‘tolerance’.

The truth is that a predominantly Conservative government is pursuing a social policy that is being driven by the minority Lib Dems.