You will note that Prime Minister Trudeau did not specify genders or marital status when he whipped off that memorable aphorism. The import, of course, is that sexual orientation and practice between consenting adults should be nobody’s business but the participants.

On Friday last, The Globe and Mail published a guest column from a woman named Sherry Coman, who lives in New Hamburg, Ontario. It is, in my view, an exceptional piece of writing, and in one paragraph illumines in an intensely personal way, what seems to me to be the essence of the controversy about same-sex marriages.

This is what Sherry Coman wrote, in part:

“I have spent my life in the Anglican Church. The words of the liturgies are inside my soul, the baptismal covenant expresses everything I believe in.

“But because I am a lesbian, I continually feel that my church is uncertain what to do with me. My person and my sexual orientation are apparently divisible; one part of me is loved by God, the other not. Most specifically, it is believed by very caring and thoughtful people, that my desire to be in holy union with my beloved is a source of tremendous anxiety to God.” A fascinating question there: can the person be divorced from their sexual orientation? Do you deny the person when personal rights are limited according to gender?

The Courts of Canada and the United States are saying it is a transgression of natural rights for governments (and therefore unconstitutional) to deny the person on gender grounds.

In other words — ruling that rights are indivisible from the person.

Some political ideologues, notably those who fall under the rubric of social conservatism, and some churches and/or fundamentalist elements of some churches, hold that the transgression occurs when the courts decide as such — that it is a transgression of God’s will — to accord the sacrament of marriage to persons of the same sex.

George Bush is trying to relieve God’s anxiety over such matters in the United States (where there are now more African-Americans in jail than in college) by seeking a law from the United States Senate and the Congress that would ban same-sex marriage, because, says he “…any re-definition (of marriage) would weaken (traditional man-woman) marriage.”

The President of the United States does not explain just how marriages between same-sex people would weaken and worsen marriages between those of differing genders, considering the fact that divorce or abandonment already break up half the opposite gender marriages taking place these days.

Indeed, that statistical disaster zone raises the question of why same-sex couples want to enter such dangerous ground in the first place?

What Bush really wants is to placate those on the socially conservative right wing of his party who believe government should interfere in questions of “morality,” and stay out of the regulation of matters concerning the economy and the ecology of the country.

John Kerry and John Edwards — seeking to remove George Bush from the presidency of their country by democratic means — don’t agree with same-sex marriages either. They, however, duck the moral question by referring the argument over same-sex marriages to the state legislatures for legislative resolution. That is hardly a brave and resolute stand on the question, but one they hope will dispose of the contentious issue until after the fall elections.

In this country, the issue floated around like a hovering bomb in the election just past, but never became a focal issue. Instead, I was told by Conservative Party candidates that it was a “doorstep” issue, discussed there or in the kitchen, and one which would do terrible damage to the Liberals with their Trudeau legacy of non-governmental involvement.

Judging by the P.E.I. results, and nationally as well, it would seem that anger and resentment at any tolerance of same-sex marriage ranked well down the list of voter priorities, and certainly ranked nowhere close to fear and loathing of the Conservative Party leader, Stephen Harper, and what his agenda really was about.

The last minute statements by one of his loyal associates, Randy White, didn’t help much. White muttered that his party would not hesitate to use the infamous notwithstanding clause to do in Canada what Bush is attempting in his country, and Harper would not disavow those thoughts.

The argument over homosexuality — whether it is genetically inspired, environmentally conditioned, or a matter of lifestyle choice — has by now become somewhat tiresome. What is relevant is that it is a fact of life in the human condition, as it is elsewhere in nature.

Indeed, I have suggested (with tongue solidly in cheek) to some people, that God must love homosexuals — because he made so many of them.

Either that, or God has a very strange and cruel sense of humour.

What is equally clear is that the presence of homosexuality engenders stark and outrageous fear in many people, including those who have never knowingly encountered a real-life homosexual. This is not a unique phenomenon — fear most abundantly blossoms in the compost of ignorance.

The question of gay marriage, the fear of it, is tearing the Anglican Church apart. It is the most divisive issue to haunt the hierarchy of the church in many years. Most recently the General Synod of the Anglican Church in Canada passed a resolution on the final day of the convention which seemed to be in direct conflict to a resolution passed a day earlier.

In any case, the resolution goes as far as affirming (whatever that means)…“ the integrity and sanctity (however those words are defined) of committed adult same-sex relationships (in whatever way those relationships are measured).”

That, apparently, does not mean the blessing of the marriage sacrament may be proffered to same-sex unions. I asked an Anglican cleric of long standing exactly what the polite phrases meant. The response was,“It’s nothing more than ecclesiastical gobbledygook,” apparently designed to put the matter on hold until the year 2007.

In other words, it’s the church playing mind games and politics with the faithful and that is an intensely cruel thing to do to those who are sincere about their love with another of the same sex.

But, just as Trudeau’s removal of homosexual activity between consenting adults from the Criminal Code still angers conservative-minded people who are offended by and cannot accept the legitimacy of homosexual love, so the passage of that resolution stirred conservative-minded Anglicans to new resentment.

The forces against the conferring of the marriage sacrament on couples of like gender are led by a group called Anglican Essentials, with headquarters in Montreal. They, like George Bush, and Stephen Harper, and other like-minded and often good-hearted people, reject Sherry Coman’s contention that she and her sexual orientation are indivisible.

You hear it in the mantra, “Hate the sin…. Love the sinner” — oft repeated as a nostrum for same-sex acceptance into the sacrament of marriage, as though the excisement of sexuality from the person were as simple and clean and final as the paring of the core from the apple.

Sherry Coman says to us from her soul, that her indivisibility must be understood, and in the end, accepted by those who accept their own heterosexual nature. “I long for the day,” she writes, “when a living church offers me the fullest possible membership so that I can be the best possible witness to its message of love.”

But neither secular politicians seeking votes, or churchly politicians seeking not to offend, come close to answering Sherry Coman’s seminal question about the indivisibility of her nature.