With the same-sex-marriage furore continuing (kept turbulent by this week's plebiscite shenanigans) methought it time to remind myself of what it is about the thought of homosexual marriage that leaves so many Christians aghast. Our society's conservative Christians are the Australians most agitated by the spectre of marriage equality and the Australians most likely to be the most hurtfully outspoken (Labor says it fears) if there is a feverish plebiscite Yes/No campaign.

And so, to remind myself of why conservative Christians stand where they do on this matter, I took a running plunge into the theological Deep End of the Book of Genesis, in search of Adam and Eve, imagined by believers to be the Almighty's marital prototype.

Those of us who are enthusiastically for the marriage equality reform can be a bit trendy and smart-arsed (atheists, my mob, can be some of the worst smart arses in Christendom) about Christians' homo-forebodings. We may scoff that anti-marriage-equality Christians have no sound scriptural reasons and are just believer-bigots.

But is it clod-hopping of non-believers to imagine that the radical re-definition of what is a marriage is not genuinely, society-shakingly distressing for lots of our sincere Christian brothers and sisters.

And when and if you believe the Bible's persuasive account of God's creation of Eve you do have to sit up and take notice of the fact that God didn't just dash off a replica of Adam.

The importance of Adam and Eve to Christians has just been reinforced for me during my Swedish orgy of visits to Gotland's medieval churches. The two lively youngsters were medievally everywhere. Olde carvings and paintings of them depict them with golden hair so as to make them more plausible for overwhelmingly blonde Nordic parishioners. This suggests, too, that the Garden of Eden, Paradise, was not as scholars say in the Middle East but was in Scandinavia. We know from Genesis that the two were at first (until they yielded to temptation and ate the apple) at ease with nudity. It is easy to imagine them skinny-dipping in the bracingly, and for Adam scrotum-shrivellingly chilly waters of an Eden fjord.

Yes, it is Adam and his wife who prop up conservative Christian opposition to same-sex wedlock. When you make an online pilgrimage to ChristianAnswers.Net and quiz its Christian answerers with "What does the Bible say about same sex marriage?" a cunning spin-preacher takes you at once to Genesis, to God's invention of Eve.

The preacher reminds you of the action-packed events of Genesis Chapter 2 and then preaches that "When God created a partner for Adam He created Eve - not another Adam. This means that perfect partnership requires some level of difference as well as a level of similarity ... Sexual intimacy between a man and a woman is the normal method of male/female bonding (emotionally and physically) because it corresponds to God's design of our bodies and because it is the normal means by which offspring are created. If God had intended the human race to be fulfilled through both heterosexual and homosexual marriage, He would have designed our bodies to allow reproduction [by both male and female couples]."

Alas, though, the Bible's Adam and Eve short story has left conservative Christians obsessed with sex. This insistence that marriage must be all about making the two-backed beast so as to make babies will amuse almost all married people living their married lives in the real world.

For although we know (from a rude joke Dawn French tells in an episode of Vicar of Dibley) that Adam was pumped up by lust the first time he saw Eve, in real marriages libidos soon ebb away. Happily married folk derive infinitely more than the pleasures of the flesh from living in tandem. Umpteen studies show that married people live longer, healthier, happier lives. http://www.dailylife.com.au/health-and-fitness/dl-fitness/do-married-people-live-longer-20131025-2w69o.html This in itself seems a good, kind, even Christian reason to want to make marriage available to people irrespective of the sexuality.

It is a shame that the Bible doesn't stay with the First Couple much beyond their honeymoon, lust-at-first-sight Vicar of Dibley phase. What if the Bible had gone on to describe Adam and Eve as cheerful empty nesters (their three boys having long since left home) and now contentedly middle-aged together?

We might in Genesis see them just sitting at home together, with Adam knitting and Eve (by far the brighter of the two) reading the latest challenging book by Richard Dawkins.

I see them, all that sex and reproduction nonsense behind them now, enjoying the kind of companionate love that all of us have the right to enjoy and to have our society sanction.

I see them walking their dog together (needless to say it is an English springer spaniel, God's chosen breed). And what fun the little dog is having (all those trees!) in the Heaven-sent off-leash doggie park of the Garden of Eden.