The path to legalising gay marriage has been littered with obstacles, not least some frenzied columns on how it would lead to fathers to marrying their sons, owners marrying their pets and same-sex marriages to implode.
The most widely discussed piece was an interview in which Lord Tebbit, an ex- Tory Party chairman who served under Margaret Thatcher, said gay marriage change would allow parents to marry their children to get out of paying tax.
"It would lift my worries about inheritance tax because maybe I'd be allowed to marry my son," he told the Big Issue.
"Why not? Why shouldn't a mother marry her daughter? Why shouldn't two elderly sisters living together marry each other? I quite fancy my brother!”
Many on Twitter rushed to congratulate Tebbit as gay marriage received Royal Assent.
Lord Tebbit also said he was concerned about a lesbian queen, who would have an heir via artificial insemination.
"I said to a minister I know: have you thought this through? Because you’re doing the law of succession, too. When we have a queen who is a lesbian and she marries another lady and then decides she would like to have a child and someone donates sperm and she gives birth to a child, is that child heir to the throne?”
The former editor of the Spectator, Charles Moore, also suggested the law may as well include the right to marry a pet.
In an opinion piece for the Spectator, entitled "Why not marry a dog?" he said: " People often love their dogs very much and want to spend their life with them. So why should they not, chastely, marry them? It will be objected that animals are not people and are therefore incapable of informed consent, but this is an example of what the animal-rights gurus call speciesism.
"Besides, anyone who lives with dogs knows that most of them do not suffer from commitment-phobia or incline to desertion, substance-abuse or reckless spending.
"They make excellent life-partners. No doubt some old bigots will claim that marriage is a uniquely human institution, but it won’t take long to find enlightened vicars who believe that human and canine dignity is in a very real sense enhanced by recognising inter-species unions."