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A funny thing is happening within the Anglican communion. It is threatening to tear itself apart over a handful of people who live in monogamous, stable, long-term, loving relationships and are sufficiently religiously observant to want the church to bless them.
Ideal couples, then, for a church desperately seeking support, you might think. But they are, of course, gay and therefore, in the words of one Anglican archbishop, an abomination.
While the rest of the world considers weightier matters of life and death, the church has converted an issue most of the western world now regards as a private and personal matter into an obsession. Not for the first time, the church's moral censure leaves it in danger of seeming irrelevant - even bigoted - to outsiders of the sort it hopes to attract to its emptying pews.
Many religions have an issue with gays. Cardinal Francis Arinze, seen by some as likely to become possibly the first black pope, was booed at Georgetown University in Washington last month for suggesting that homosexuality, along with other sexual sins such as adultery and divorce, mocked the family. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, who turned a blind eye to a paedophile priest for years, intervened to prevent a bishop conducting a private blessing for the director of Cafod, the international development agency, and his long-term partner.
But it is the Anglican church which is most obsessed with what gays get up to in the privacy of their bedrooms. Since biblical references to homosexuality are scattered and, as far as the New Testament is concerned, solely to be found in the writings of St Paul, one might think it scarcely of all-consuming importance. If Jesus Christ mentioned the subject, none of the gospel writers bothered to note it.
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