As you all know, the Supreme Court this morning issued a 5-4 decision, authored by Anthony Kennedy, finding a hitherto hidden right to same-sex marriage in the American Constitution.  I have not yet read the decision, but nevertheless I have a few points to make regardless of the reasoning that necessitated 103 pages to explain.

This ruling may be the most consequential ruling ever to issue from the Supreme Court. Why? Because the Left will use it to destroy all religions except Islam (which they’re afraid to touch). They’ll use a magical new right to destroy one of the bedrock First Amendment rights.

This is not speculation, incidentally. We’ve already seen the playbook in action with the attack on Christians who politely refuse to provide their services to same-sex weddings. In a free society, the gay patrons would go down the block to find a bakery that will serve them. In the coming totalitarian society, the gays will use the machinery of the state to destroy working class Christian people. The Supreme Court’s ruling will provide the full arsenal they need to stop focusing on an individual here and there and, instead, to wage all-out war on any religious conservatives who get in their way.

More profoundly, this is the weapon gays need to complete their assault on religious institutions (rather than just upon religious people). Up until the Court’s ruling, traditional religious institutions had the First Amendment to protect them: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . . .”

Now, however, the Supreme Court has bypassed the prohibition against Congressional action and found buried in the bowels of the 14th Amendment a brand new right to gay marriage. (And who else finds it ironic that, just the other day, the Supreme Court concluded that Congress’s intent trumps everything in interpreting a statute, but today the Supreme Court entirely ignores the fact that the sole intended purpose behind the 14th amendment was to give black people full civil rights?)

What we have now is a terribly dangerous clash of constitutional rights: The explicit right to the free exercise of religion (which reaches right up into every religious institution’s right to follow its core doctrines) versus the magical new right for same-sex couples to marry. In today’s environment, want to bet which right wins? Obama’s “Justice” Department will come down like a ton of bricks on any religious school that preaches traditional marriage or any tax-exempt church that refuses to marry a gay couple.

Again, I know this for a fact because the gays and their fellow travelers on my Facebook feed have already been demanding that the feds repeal the tax exempt status given to religious institutions. (In this new dawn of “freedom,” the faithful will be forced to give up their faith.) What these people fully understand is that the reason religious institutions are tax-exempt is to ensure that the government cannot destroy any or all houses of worship by taxing them out of existence.

Nor is this a situation analogous to abortions, which upset religious conservatives, but didn’t destroy them. Religious institutions and Pro-Life people don’t perform abortions. Religious institutions and traditional marriage people do, however, perform marriages, whether in a church, temple, or mosque, or in a courthouse. They will be attacked and destroyed. (Again, don’t just take my word for it. Look at France.)

The situation also isn’t analogous to the short, ugly interlude in America when Southern states barred interracial marriage. Irrespective of skin color, heterosexual couples of whatever race have the necessary biological equipment to procreate: Tab A inserts into slot B. That is how Mother Nature intended human joining to occur. Not to deny gay couples the pleasures they find in bed, but Nature had nothing to do with Tab A has fun with Tab A or Slot B romps with Slot B. They are not two halves of the same whole. They are the functional equivalent of two Left shoes (pun intended).

Thomas Lifson has the right of it (pun intended, again), when he notes that the decision will also open the door to lots of other things that will be very problematic:

I have not read the entire decision but wonder if there are any grounds in it on which polygamy can be ruled anything other than a fundamental right. And after that, incest and every other marriage taboo. Once marriage becomes a matter of personal gratification, the doors seem wide open.

It will be very expensive once we’re required to recognize polygamy. Living as we do in a welfare state, we’ll find ourselves in the same position as those European countries that recognize all the wives their newly immigrated Muslim citizens bring in. Welfare won’t be limited to a nuclear family. Instead, it will include Ali Baba, his 40 wives, and his 200 children — and in the next generation, those children’s families too.

Finally, to all the people on my Facebook page trumpeting ” love wins”: You are morons. Marriage is not about love. It’s about religion, money, parenting, and social structure, all of which are intended to protect society as a whole. Love is just a pleasant byproduct and one can love without the state’s imprimatur.

By the way, you know how you can tell that this is a made-up right? The 103-page opinion. If this were a real right, it wouldn’t take anywhere near that long to explain it. When you’re telling a legal lie, though, you have to add a lot of detail to hide the empty center. That’s why Leftist Supreme Court decisions are invariably longer and more complex than conservative ones: they’re making it up as they go.

For more on the terrible problems with the decision, including a lengthy (and extremely intelligent statement from Roberts’ dissent), go here.

And what do all of you think of the decision?

UPDATE:  Had I read Scalia’s dissent, I would have seen that he too understands that the florid, overwrought, extremely long brief is something that is full of sound and fury in an effort to hide the reality, which is that nothing lies at its heart:

The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic. It is one thing for separate concurring or dissenting opinions to contain extravagances, even silly extravagances, of thought and expression; it is something else for the official opinion of the Court to do so. Of course the opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent. “The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality.”23 (Really? Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? . . .

I’ll say it again: Leftist opinions (that is, opinions that advance Leftist causes, rather than just opinions written by Leftist judges) are always excessively long because they are making it up as they go.

UPDATE 2: Ace has a remarkably good riff about the fact that states recognize marriage for pragmatic purposes (mostly raising children), not LOVE. He’s absolutely right, and spells that point out in much more detail than I did.

UPDATE 3:  In April 2015, Trevor Loudon wrote about the Left’s real agenda with gay marriage.  It bears re-reading now:

The Left uses “rights” agendas to wrap itself in the mantle of righteousness and seize the moral high ground, tactically putting us on the defense in the process. But they couldn’t care less about the actual issue except in its ability to facilitate their path to power.

The agenda is never the agenda for the Left. And this is especially true for gay marriage. Homosexual marriage is a Trojan horse tactic. The true agenda is to establish the primacy of homosexual rights over the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion. Our nation was founded on this principle, and the gay marriage movement seeks to destroy it.

Consider that Annise Parker, the lesbian mayor of Houston, Texas, demanded to review pastors’ church sermons before public outrage forced her to back off. We have already seen how small businesses have been singled out and attacked for refusing to provide certain services to gays.

What is less known is that these gay couples are frequently part of the movement. They deliberately seek out businesses known for their Christian owners. They deliberately demand a service they know in advance will be refused. When the inevitable happens they use it as pretext to destroy the business and savage its owners. Doesn’t it amaze you how quickly legal groups immediately materialize to assist in the attack? The fact that they got unexpected push back through a spontaneous crowd sourcing campaign to support one pizza shop will not dissuade them from future efforts. If gay marriage is adopted, their current bullying behavior will look like child’s play compared to what’s coming.

This is a highly organized, nationwide campaign of vilification against Christians. But even Christians are not the ultimate target. If the First Amendment can be challenged this way; if a certain group’s “rights” can trump the U.S. Constitution, and if the Supreme Court can actually issue an edict making it so, then the entire Constitution has become meaningless. This is the Left’s true agenda and it always has been. This is the Cultural Marxists’ endgame. The issue is not the issue. The issue for them has always been destroying our country to impose socialism — with them in charge, of course. In order to do that they have to strip America of its culture, its traditions, and most importantly, the most important law of the land, the U.S. Constitution.