Democracy is (bleeding obvious alert) a numbers game. I think it's worth wondering whether gay people in this country actually outnumber practising members of the Church of England. In 2001, the average Sunday attendance of church or cathedral worship was 1 million, which is 1.7% of the population. Of course, figures swell enormously on Christmas Eve, but those extra yuletide churchgoers are to the regular lot what people who get off with their same-sex friend for a bet at a Christmas party are to the gay community - not terrifically important.

A national survey of sexual attitudes and behaviour, undertaken in 1990, found that 1.4% of men had had a male partner in the last five years, while 0.6% of women had had a female one. However, when the survey was conducted again 10 years later, excluding people over 45, it found that 2.6% of men and women had had a same-sex partner in the past five years.

So, even if you were to assume that some of those partnerships had expired, to be replaced by heterosexual ones (this would count as the Christmas audience, I suppose), you're still left with the C of E commanding fewer adherents, and you are also faced with the more important truth that churchgoers are an ageing population, whereas gay people are not.