MEANWHILE BACK IN THE STATES... Hate to interrupt the pleasant England blogging, but it seems every time I look in on the gay marriage obsessives, they get more fascinatingly mad.

Today's prize loon, and perhaps the decade's, is John Derbyshire, such a notorious homophobe that Andrew Sullivan named an award for intolerance after him, now insisting that, when not fantasizing aloud about the prison rape of his opponents, he's actually a very live-and-let-live sort of bloke, and uses as evidence previous writings in which he expresses pity for gay folks' "mismatched bodies and psyches." Wotta pal. Elsewhere he directs us to another tolerant fella, one Noah Millman. Millman is smoother than Derb (who isn't?). He makes all the expected sorrow-not-in-anger feints at reasonableness, then compares being gay to being a cat-strangler. Sound like a reductive analysis? I'm sure Millman would say so, too, but I've read the piece twice and that is definitely not an unfair summary.

Further down, Millman says the wages of same-sex marriages would be "female-headed families without fathers, where the men come and go, sponging from the women or seizing what they want, a form of family organization that appears to be incompatible with civilization itself." Again, this may sound like a misreading on the face of it: no one with any reputation, even in the too-forgiving blogosphere, can be getting over with this crap, can they? But he is, Blanche, he is: go look for yourself if you think you can stomach it.

Sometimes in this space I'm a little too free and easy with accusations of insanity, but in the cases of Millman and Derbyshire, clinical observation does seem to be indicated.