As a Brit I am of course deeply interested in the U.S. elections because (as I think I've said before) they are really more important for my future than any UK elections. Shame I don't get to vote, though, when it will affect me as much as it will.

Having said that, from where I sit it's hard to choose between Hillary and Obama. Both have big plus points and big minus points. I don't set much store beside charges of dishonesty during an election campaign -- these things are always overheated and anyone can be taken out of context and probably usually are. However the larger issue is important: as I've certainly said before, if people are dishonest in some ways they'll likely be dishonest with voters and parties and who knows what else. But . . . politics is about reality, not ideals . . . and I worry about the state of democracy worldwide (e.g. in the election for London Mayor the electorate was faced with a tricky, certainly dishonest radical left-winger who'd been in power for 8 years and done all sorts of crazy things, and a solidly right-wing super-rich playboy, very smart and totally untrustworthy. Does that sort of choice add up to 'democracy'?

Well, that's fascinating. Of course, the word 'Evangelical' has a long history -- people have written whole books about it -- and like many other words it means subtly different things in the UK from what it means in the USA. (And neither corresponds to the German word evangelisch, which often simply means 'Lutheran' as opposed to katholisch, Catholic.)

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People, groups, states and nations are of course free to use words in fresh ways if they wish. That has always been the case; words are flexible and fluid. But for the vast majority of human history across cultures and geography, and for all the great religious traditions, 'marriage' and its equivalent words in different languages has referred to the (intentionally lifelong) union of a man and a woman. To argue for a change in that is not simply to argue for something that the Christian tradition has never before sanctioned (as though it was simply a 'liberalization' of a small point of arcane religious teaching). It is to change the meaning of the word. If a state wants to do that, fine, but it ought simultaneously to allow -- as a matter of logic, not of ethics -- that people who want to refer to the thing which 'marriage' always used to refer to may need to find another word with which to do it.

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