Grace Dent: 33 marriages at the Grammys - now we can all be equally ridiculous

For too long, straight people have had the right to wacky weddings and to drive-thru Vegas emotional car-crashes

Same Love: Macklemore & Ryan Lewis were joined on stage by Madonna, Mary Lambert (left) and Queen Latifah (right), who officiated the 33 weddings (Getty Images)

During the battle for “gay marriage”, some gay friends have pointed out they don’t care much for that term and prefer the less marginalising, quietly powerful term “equal marriage”. I understand this quibble completely. Forgive me if I use both when I’m writing, it is a brave new dawn and we’re all on a learning curve. But I like the term “equal marriage” as it enforces the idea that gay people are entitled to mate for life or make the same bloody expensive ridiculous mistakes in the name of passion that straight folk do.

I thought of this again during Sunday night’s Grammy Awards when Queen Latifah married 33 couples – gay and straight – while Madonna stumbled around in a cowboy hat with a cane, just after Daft Punk (older readers: they’re the ones who dance about in masks, the Vice-generation Tweenies) and on the same bill as Beyoncé’s camel toe.

For too long, straight people have had the right to ridiculous weddings and to drive-thru Vegas emotional car-crashes, the right to demand that their families wear pastel shades on a beach in the Dominican Republic, the right to doomed ceremonies in Klingon with every guest quietly seething after giving their card details to the John Lewis giftlist.

In 2014, same-sex couples demand the equal right to be this foolish. “We were married by the woman from Barbershop 2 and Madge dressed as Boss Hogg from The Dukes of Hazzard,” they can say, “And yes it lasted three months and now I live in a Comfort Inn, but this, my friends, is equality.”