All Roads Lead to Jesus

Big British supermarkets are incomparably nicer than their American counterparts, and British frozen fish, for instance, is free of the myriad dreadful additives found in the American equivalent. But British streets are comically narrow (having originally been footpaths, long before there were cars or even horses) and boringly named. As a son of the southern California suburbs (and a former resident of San Francisco), I’m used to street names like Windspray Lane (and Jack Kerouac Alley). Indeed, I spent three of my most (de)formative years on Billowvista Drive. Here, though, all the roads, as the locals prefer to call streets, seem to have been named sometime before 1853, after saints, former monarchs, and military heroes. 


It’s grim! It's stuffy! If there’s one Vicarage Road in this country, there are a million.  If there’s one Church Road, there are 10 million. And in spite of being American, and thus incapable of enjoying or even detecting irony, I have not failed to note that it’s America, which makes its politicians feign piety, rather than the UK, where sanctimony and politics wouldn’t even recognise one another on the street, or road, that has the cool secular street names.

Speaking of piety, I may be far away geographically here in Thanet, but am still following American politics (albeit via the Guardian’s excellent Website). I know that Republican presidential candidates are being asked to sign something called The Marriage Vow – A Declaration of Dependence Upon Marriage and Family, which is mostly a refutation of what proponents of the gay agenda call marriage equality.

I have had my office contact the authors of the pledge to get them to transmit a PDF version of it that I may “sign” electronically and return to them, though if nominated I will not run, and if elected, I will not serve, for I have come to agree fervently that marriage is indeed sacred, and can involve only one man and one woman, except in desolate areas solely lacking in Christians, where polygamy might be essential, just for a couple of generations. I am myself a single (in the sense of non-multiple) man married to a single (though married, to me) woman, and have come to believe that gay marriage would ultimately make a mockery of the sacred institution in the end. To love another enough to be content to spend one’s evenings staring stupidly at the television together years after the last trace of mutual sexual attraction has disappeared, one must first love himself, and I don’t believe anyone can love himself without first loving Jesus, and how can one who knowingly violates Biblical proscriptions against sodomy be said to love Jesus?