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Britain has always tried to be both European and American. This is an uneasy balancing act since the old world and the new world have very different outlooks on life.

Civil partnerships, or 'gay weddings' if you prefer your monikers dumbed-down, are a perfect case in point. Europe, in its usual piecemeal leaders-and-laggards way, had been adopting civil partnerships in recent years. The point of them is not to replicate weddings, but to confer some of the legal and fiscal benefits of weddings onto other partnerships. All very reasonable and modern-thinking.

The American approach is to be absolutely terrified of civil partnership. By 'America' I mean the collective jurisdictional entity of America, not the individuals. I know many Americans and most of them are wholly in favour of equality. But the people in power seem to have a different view, and they also seem to get a lot of votes.

The American approach seems to take two fundamental arguments:

1. Someone is happy, and I don't like it one bit!

2. If I allow him/her to do something I wouldn't do, then they might infect me and I would end up like them.

The first argument is what politicians live and breath for. Politicians are unhappy people. Most of them have inferiority complexes, often with good reason, and their chosen answer to being unhappy is to attack anyone that isn't unhappy.

The second argument is the Cuba principal. Cuba is one of the most harmless counties on earth, but America is scared of it. Americans are not even allowed to visit Cuba, just in case they catch the Cuba virus and bring it back to the mainland, at which point, well, I am not sure what is meant to happen next. America is the most powerful nation on the planet and is scared is one of one of the weakest. So really it is Cuba that has all the power while America cowers.

There is a more fundamental error made by those who oppose civil partnerships - they make an assumption that people are either heterosexual or homosexual, or maybe occasionally a bit of both. The reality is that we are all bisexual, but most of us have a natural, and often strong, bias to one end of the continuum.

We are also all ambidextrous, but early in life settle on either a left- or right-hand bias. If we needed to we could switch hands, and after just a few days practice could completely switch sides. There is nothing profoundly right or wrong about handedness, it is just one of those things.

Of course, people used to be very prejudiced about handedness. The word sinister literally means 'left-handed', but over the years people have pulled their heads out of the asses and accepted that left-handed people are no different to right-handed people.

Sexuality is the same as handedness but somehow got left in the dark ages. As a race we are at the point where all that changes and as always there is someone resisting change while others power ahead. The irony is that is the new world that is dragging its heels, while the old world set the pace.