So, here's the deal. You meet someone and you immediately get butterflies in your stomach. Your mouth goes dry when you talk to them and, when you're apart, your first instinct when you see or hear something interesting is to immediately contact your new partner and tell them what you just learned.

Then, as time goes on, you both move in together and, one magical night over a romantic meal, your proposal is accepted.

Now you can look forward to spending the rest of your life with your beloved, safe and secure and happy in the knowledge that, as the security of any State is largely based on people having strong ties in the community and an emotional, financial and spiritual investment in their environment, society will welcome you with open arms.

But, of course, you're wrong. Because you're gay.

This is the crux of the current debate about civil partnerships currently being played out around the country.

And it's one which sees logic railing against illogic; tolerance against intolerance and common sense versus base, rank stupidity.

Frankly, it is a matter of supreme indifference to me if someone is gay, just as it is one of supreme indifference if someone fancies women with big arses or prefers boobs.

After all, you is what you is, as they say, and as long as your proclivities don't extend to children or animals and involves consenting adults, then go at it with gusto (that's the reason why the mass hysteria about Michael Jackson is baffling to me; my first reaction on hearing of his death was to shrug my shoulders and think 'one less paedophile stalking the earth').

But as last Saturday's Dublin Gay Pride march -- marking the 40th anniversary of the momentous Stonewall riots in New York -- proved, large sections of the gay community really do their cause no favours.

Track back a second -- it was interesting to see some of the more prickly members -- as it were -- of the gay community who were so outraged at Bruno.

According to one American gay rights organisation, Bruno: "is pandering to clichés", while here in Ireland, one particularly commentator whined that: "With his naked bottom and angel wings and blond hair ... Bruno is portraying the worst stereotypes of the gay community -- narcissistic, promiscuous and self-indulgent."

And she was right, of course, because that's what satire does -- it takes something that is already there and amps it to 11, and if people are too bovine and stupid to see that then that is their problem, not ours.

If you were to take the stereotypical homophobe and ask him what he thinks of gay people, he would probably accurately describe exactly the kind of idiot you often see at these marches -- assless chaps, handlebar moustaches and a series of people competing with each other to see who can dress in the most outrageous fashion.

And it is completely counterproductive.

The gay community often liken their cause to the Civil Rights cause in America in the 1960s and there are undoubted similarities.

Both were vilified by large sections of the majority population, they were demonised and caricatured.

Myths developed and grew roots and even among some of the more supposedly enlightened sections of the community at large, you would hear the interchangeable refrain of "I'm not racist but ... " or "I'm not homophobic but ... "

And, if gay people are going to continue to use the language of the Civil Rights, as indeed they should, then they should ask themselves this question -- when the black community marched in places like Selma in the 1960s, demanding equality and a stop to the crass demonisation and stereotyping of their community, did any of them dress as jungle savages with bones through their nose and spears in their hand?

Of course they didn't, and anyone who tried to do so wouldn't have lasted long among his peers.

Yet that is exactly what these fools do; they give their critics the opportunity to look at each other with smug confirmation and say: "You see? And these people want to be allowed to adopt children? I don't bloody think so."

If you prance around like a prat, that is how you are going to be treated.

Like everyone else, the gay community needs to realise that if it wants to be accepted by everyone else, they shouldn't be giving their opponents so much bloody ammunition. And they need to stop being so bloody touchy about everything.

Both myself and Kevin Myers have written about the disgraceful disciplinary procedures brought against a bunch of firemen in Nottingham who shone a light into a bunch of bushes in a public park which was populated by rutting gay men.

Were the gay lads arrested for public indecency?

Nope, the firemen were demoted and the Terence Higgins Trust demanded they endure forced counselling to cure them of their "homophobic behaviour".

How ironic and sad that homosexuals, who until a few decades ago were judged to have had a psychological disorder and could be "cured", are now demanding the same kind of forced indoctrination against people they see as thought criminals.

This is exactly the kind of behaviour that fuels people's fears of a "gay agenda", as if gay people meet every Saturday in a secret lair and try to figure out ways of getting their own back on straights, or "breeders" as some of them say.

Discrimination on the grounds of sexuality is as stupid as discrimination on the grounds of colour, if only because there are so many better reasons to dislike someone than who they like to kiss or the colour of their skin. All it takes is a little time to get to know the person and find their personality flaws.

But disliking someone because they dress like the Widow Twankie and start screaming in a ridiculously camp voice about their rights is not homophobic -- it's simply an obvious response any of us feel when we're in the presence of a fool.

Or does not liking to look at a bunch of blokes with arses hanging out of their tight-whities cut-off shorts make you a homophobe?

Oh well, if that's the case I guess I'll have the Press Council coming after this column for upsetting gay people.

Again.

- Ian O'Doherty