The other day, six Anglican archbishops called for the church to bless the unions of same-sex couples.

What struck me was the rationale the archbishops came up with. This gay thing, they sighed. We've been yakking about it for years. Let's just get on with it, and then we can get back to the important stuff.

That's it? Anglicans need to fast-track a liturgy for gay couples so they can free up time to deal with the real issues like global warming?

"What is at risk is not the climate but freedom," said the Czech president Vaclav Klaus this week. "I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning."