The MCC tries to attract people positively to committed relationships rather than castigating the false-starts that may occur as people attempt to develop such relationships.

For a long time there was no gay marriage; now we have it across all Canada and also in the Netherlands where I lived previously. I was together with my boyfriend long before that possibility emerged in either country, but I took the Quaker view (from the 1950's onward) that committed gay partners were "married before God" and no human ceremony was necessary to authenticate this. I still do not believe that marriage in the eyes of God has to be initiated by a ritual. This is part of my protestantism, I suppose: we can all be baptised in the holy spirit; we can all be priests when called to be.

If an engaged but chaste hetero couple were stranded on a desert island with no minister around for the next 20 years, would it be legitimate for them to deem themselves married and begin to have sex and start a family? Perhaps in some branches of christianity they would be whoring if they did this, but not in mine.

Gay couples have been on this desert island, deprived of marriage ceremony, ever since the eastern orthodox churches gave up marrying same-sex couples in the 1400s AD.

God will judge which of their (our) sex acts are marital.