Big news from the gay nuptials front comes to us from Michigan, where on July 13 the Rev. Brian Hutchison, pastor of the Cassopolis United Methodist Church, was married to his betrothed, Monty Hutchison, to the approbation of the entire community.

Actually, that’s not what happened. The truth is that Brian had been dismissed from his pastorate after admitting to his superior, Rev. John Boley, that he was a practicing homosexual and was romantically involved with Monty, both violations under the rules of the United Methodist Church. So, though depicted as a "pastor" in local media, he was an ex-reverend at best.

The wedding was held only days later, which was rather odd, considering that Brian was out of work and might not be expected to support Monty in the style to which he had become accustomed.

As for the crowd – it turns out that out of the hundred or so present, no less than thirty, count ‘em, thirty, were fellow Methodist ministers (excepting Rev. Ginny Mikita, a short-haired lady who had been ordained by means of an online “ministry” a few days earlier in order to officiate at the ceremony. Rev. Mikita deserves a column on herself alone.) In fact, no less than fifteen, led by Rev. Mark Thompson, were involved in carrying out the ceremony. (Whether they spoke the marriage text in unison or was each assigned a word is unknown.) The clerics, a mixture of male and female, were dressed in a variety of clerical robes, but most featured multicolored rainbow stoles. These you can take as a tell: if your pastor shows up wearing one, it’s time to hit the road.

So it’s clear what was happening here: the ceremony was, as much as anything else, a publicity stunt, a last-ditch effort to cover up a failure to overturn the tenets of the Methodist communion as regards homosexuality.

The whole scene might well remind the historically conscious of the rituals carried out in the heyday of the Soviet Union. During the epoch of the Five-Year Plans of the 30s, totally bogus spectacles would be mounted in praise of the “peasants of the Red Star Kolkhoz, who harvested 10,000 tons of wheat, over ten times their annual norm”. In front of massive piles of grain, officials would pose, speeches would be made, peasants marched up and presented with medals, all of it filmed for newsreels to be shown across the USSR.

And when it was all over, the grain, which had been trucked in from half a dozen neighboring collective farms, would be loaded up by all those medal-wearing peasants and trucked back to where it came from. What mattered was the entirely synthetic event, not the fact that any kind of harvest had occurred.

It’s quite the same thing here: a fine show, with all those robes and multicolored stoles, but, in the only meaningful sense, no marriage.

It’s the same level of unreality. Only the characters and setting have changed.