Whatever the truth of reports that Prime Minister David Cameron now sees gay marriage as 'the worst political decision of his premiership', he should regret it politically and morally.
Whilst the same-sex marriage bill is not the only reason the Conservative Party is losing both members and voters to Ukip, it is a factor, a piece in the jigsaw contributing to the picture of the party they once loyally supported now selling its soul to political correctness.
Ukip could well lose Mr Cameron the next General Election. Before the recent surge in support for Ukip, I recall being told by a Euro-sceptic Conservative MP friend of mine that a vote for Ukip was 'extremely foolish' because it would allow Labour in. His fears were well-grounded. If UKIP splinters the Tory vote in a similar way to the impact of the SDP on Labour in the 1980s, it is possible in our first-past-the-post electoral system for Labour to achieve a small working Parliamentary majority with around 35 per cent of the national vote in 2015.
But the reality is that many conservatively-minded voters are so cheesed off with the Cameronite Conservative Party that they do not see much difference between it and Labour. It would appear that a growing number of them would like to punish it for its infidelity to traditional Judaeo-Christian values even if that would risk putting Mr Miliband into Number 10.
I personally got a whiff of the politically-correct direction the Conservative Party was taking when I attended a meeting addressed by Mr Cameron in Sheffield during the 2010 election campaign. I asked Mr Cameron about the impact of the 2010 Equality Act on Christian churches and organisations that believed on biblical grounds that homosexual practice was wrong and that heterosexual marriage was the only right context for the expression of sexual love.
Mr Cameron's answer was very revealing. It was along the lines that 'faith groups' should be allowed to operate because they did good things such as running soup kitchens but this permission was conditional on their being accepting of the change of cultural attitude towards gay rights that the Equality Act enshrined.
I found it astonishing that the leader of the Conservative Party should suggest that the state has the right to grant British Christians freedom of worship provided they meet certain politically correct criteria rather than regarding the freedom to practise biblical Christianity as the inherent right of the free-born British people, whose unelected constitutional Monarch promised to defend 'the Faith', namely the Protestant Christian Faith, at her Coronation.
I remember thinking when I listened to Mr Cameron's reply (and he was impressive at that meeting, looking and sounding like a Prime Minister in waiting): 'We're stuffed.'
That, I now believe, was an ungodly thought, for the Lord Jesus Christ clearly affirmed that the gates of hell will never prevail against His church (Matthew 16v18). Mr Cameron's reply was nonetheless disturbing and the state-controlling attitude that underlay it is surely the reason why he is losing so much Conservative support.
True, Burkean Conservatives do not believe that the state should replace Almighty God and that it is why they are deeply disturbed when any government, especially a Conservative one, presumes to interfere with that which God created in the beginning - before the state became necessary due to human fallenness.
