How revealing and repellent it is that religious people should waste their time arguing about whether two adults who love each other should have the right to solemnize their marriage in church! These so-called religious leaders could be devoting their energy to the real problems of war, poverty, disease, global warming, terrorism, and the virulent religious and tribal hatreds that ruin lives and defy reason around the world.

Why don't those homophobic African bishops call down the wrath of God upon the millions of African men who have infected their wives with AIDS because they live in societies in which women don't have enough status to say no to husbands who engage in promiscuous sex and refuse to use condoms?

I'm happy to have the Church of England to pick on this week, since I have been accused of singling out Roman Catholics in the past. However, now that I think about it, why doesn't Pope Benedict XVI solve his church's priest shortage by embracing married and female clergy instead of trying to weed out gays from seminaries?

It amazes me--and demonstrates the continuing grip of the most irrational forms of religion--that so many gay men and women continue to seek the official approval of religious institutions that want nothing to do with them. There are plenty of religious denominations, and groups within denominations, that do welcome gays. Why do gays care what the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was last heard frothing at the mouth about the superstitious heresies in the movie The Da Vinci Code, thinks about anything? His church, after all, got its start because Henry VIII had a yen for the saucy Anne Boleyn. At least Henry wasn't gay. Although he did spend a lot of time alone with Cardinal Wolsey before they had a falling out.

In any case, gays will always find a welcome from those of us who reject the authority of all religion. "My own mind is my own church," Thomas Paine wrote in the introduction to his great book, The Age of Reason?

Gays might think about joining this church instead of looking for approval from ecclesiastical numbskulls who are still living in their endless age of unreason.