“If this Supreme Court rules against marriage, all hell is going to break loose,” or so warned Tom DeLay, the former House GOP leader. DeLay has said that “if they rule against marriage,” then “we will all defy” the “ten [sic] unelected, unaccountable people” on the court, joining a host of Religious Right leaders, including presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, in signing a vow to resist a Supreme Court ruling in favor of marriage equality.
In anticipation of the upcoming Supreme Court ruling, we’ve compiled a video of the Right’s most dire warnings about a potential decision striking down gay marriage bans, including self-proclaimed “prophet” Cindy Jacobs’ fear that gay marriage will lead to natural disasters; preacher Scott Lively predicting a devastating “calamity”; Glenn Beck turning into the anti-gay version of Martin Luther King, Jr.; Tony Perkins calling for a revolution against gay marriage; and Pat Robertson, well, being Pat Robertson.
And those are just the highlights. Conservatives have made a whole host of insane predictions about what will befall America if gay marriage becomes legal nationwide (think Eiffel tower marriage). Never mind that none of these things have happened in any of the 37 states where gay and lesbian couples can already get married. Just you wait!
1) Prepare for Jail!
Much like when conservatives claimed that the 2009 Hate Crimes Act would ban all expressions of anti-gay political opinions and criminalize religious beliefs (it didn’t), Religious Right activists are now predicting that a Supreme Court decision in favor of marriage equality will bring about the end of free speech.
“When you elevate a lifestyle to the status of a civil right, I don’t think a lot of believers fully understand or comprehend that once it’s risen to that level and our government accepts it, then anyone who disagrees with it could be at least civilly liable, but more than likely would be criminally liable,” Huckabee warned.
Huckabee also stated that the gay rights movement “won’t stop until there are no more churches, until there are no more people who are spreading the Gospel.” According to Huckabee, gay marriage will lead to “the criminalization of Christianity” and “criminal charges” against pastors who preach against it or refuse to officiate the wedding of a gay couple. Another GOP presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, also predicted that “Christian pastors who decline to perform gay marriages” or “speak out and preach biblical truths on marriage” will be punished for committing “hate speech.”
Of course, no such thing has ever happened in any of the 37 states that already have marriage equality, but Religious Right activists are insistent that gay marriage will lead to pastors being hauled off to jail en masse for breaking non-existent hate speech laws.
Religious Right leaders like Sandy Rios of the American Family Association and David Lane of the American Renewal Project have warned of impending “martyrdom,” while Rick Scarborough, a Religious Right activist and leading proponent of the “hate speech” myth, has insisted that gay marriage will make it “illegal” to “share the Gospel” and predicted that jails will soon fill up with pastors. He has even told conservatives that they should be prepared to “burn” if the court backs marriage equality.
2) Civil Disobedience
Following the Hate Crimes Act debate, Religious Right leaders unveiled a manifesto called the Manhattan Declaration, vowing to commit civil disobedience in the face of what they said was growing anti-Christian persecution as a result of gay rights.
Now, while preparing for the court’s ruling on marriage, conservatives are jumping over each other to frame themselves as the next Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a dissident Lutheran theologian who was executed by the Nazi regime.
Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, a hero of the anti-gay movement, said a pro-gay-marriage decision should be treated just like Plessy v. Ferguson and widely ignored; pastor Jim Garlow, who was instrumental in the passage of Proposition 8 in California, said that anti-gay activists will soon “become an underground resistance movement”; Lane warned of the imposition of “homosexual fascism”; and Pat Buchanan wondered about the possibility of “massive civil disobedience” similar to what “there was against segregation.” Alan Keyes said that the church must defy gay marriage in the same way a Nazi-era German citizen had to resist orders to work in the death camps.
Cruz called on anti-gay pastors to “disregard unjust edicts from government ” and Huckabee pledged to carry out civil disobedience against a ruling in favor of gay marriage, claiming it would be no different than acting “in disobedience to the Dred Scott decision of 1857.”
3) Revolution & Civil War
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins has consistently warned of an anti-gay “revolution” if the Supreme Court strikes down state bans on same-sex marriage, a feeling shared by his right-wing allies Mat Staver and Matt Barber, both of the conservative legal group Liberty Counsel.
“This is the thing that revolutions literally are made of,” Staver said. “This would be more devastating to our freedom, to our religious freedom, to the rights of pastors and their duty to be able to speak and to Christians around the country, then anything that the revolutionaries during the American Revolution even dreamed of facing. This would be the thing that revolutions are made of. This could split the country right in two. This could cause another civil war.”
Similar predictions of civil war have also come from James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, and conservative televangelist Rick Joyner. One right-wing columnist said that “this case could well be the fuse that ignites the powder keg of outrage that leads the nation into the first battle of a new war,” one which pits “homo-fascists” against “those of us who oppose their dangerous and deadly desires.
Keyes, writing in WorldNetDaily, called a gay marriage ruling a “ just cause for war.” Such a decision would be no different from “the Dred Scott decision that heralded the onset of the fist Civil War,” Keyes wrote, as it would “bring the nation to the brink” and represent “a high crime and misdemeanor that effectively dissolves the just bonds of government between and among the states, and among the individuals who compose the people of the United States.” Such a ruling, he warned, “is likely to produce the separation and dissolution of the United States.”
The stakes are high, according to Justice Moore, since a Supreme Court decision backing marriage equality will “literally cause the destruction of our country.”
4) Secession
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah thinks conservatives should have “an Exodus strategy” in case the court legalizes same-sex marriage nationwide.
“Will a U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring ‘same-sex marriage’ a ‘right’ warrant secession by some state willing and eager to reclaim America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and foundation?” Farah asked. “Is there one state in 50 that would not only defy the coming abomination, but secede in response? The rewards could be great. I would certainly consider relocating. How about you?”
He added: “If not a state, are there any nations in the world interested in a pilgrimage by millions of Americans?”
One conservative author, former Reagan aide Douglas MacKinnon, has even suggested that Southern states form a separate nation that will ban same-sex marriage , proposing that the secessionists call the new anti-gay nation “Reagan.”
5) Holocaust
Seeing that Religious Right activists regularly call gay rights activists terrorists, Al Qaeda and ISIS members, fascists, Nazis, and the ones who are to blame for the Holocaust, it comes as no surprise that several activists have warned of an impending holocaust of American Christians if gays and lesbians can get married nationwide.
For example, Staver and Bradlee Dean, a Religious Right activist and talk show host, have both appropriated Martin Niemöller’s famous Nazi-era “First They Came for the Socialists…” poem to warn of anti-Christian persecution in America. Staver even claims that America is already worse than Nazi Germany. While discussing non-discrimination laws that protect LGBT people, Perkins, the FRC president, wondered when the government is “going to start rolling out the boxcars to start hauling off Christians.” Former Bush administration official Robert Reilly said gay rights advocates are creating conditions in the U.S. similar to the ones which “led to the Holocaust, World War II and the death of 60 million people.”
One article that became popular among right-wing groups even stated that the gay rights movement will do to American Christians what the Turks did to the Armenians and what the Hutus did to the Tutsis. The author even warned that American Christians will soon be facing persecution as Christians do in Syria.
Not to be outdone, Keyes has claimed that gay marriage is part of a communist plot that paves the way for “the murder of the masses.”
6) Child endangerment
The civil disobedience pledge signed by Huckabee, Santorum and dozens of Religious Right leaders includes a stern warning that “authorizing the legal equivalency of marriage to same-sex couples undermines the fundamental rights of children and threatens their security, stability, and future,” a theme frequently repeated by anti-gay conservatives.
Santorum said that if he is elected president, he will flout the court’s ruling in order to “protect children.” Garlow, the California pastor, said that gay marriage will “be profoundly destructive, profoundly harming” to children, who he says will bear the brunt of “the catastrophic consequences, the pain, the suffering inflicted on the human race by this redefinition of marriage.” David Barton, a right-wing pseudo-historian, claimed that gay marriage will legalize pedophilia .
To get a snapshot of such views, just check out what the insane anti-gay film “Light Wins” says about the gay plan to “groom” children.
7) God’s wrath
Mike Huckabee has warned that gay marriage will unleash divine punishment on America. While he didn’t get into specifics, others on the Right have been happy to describe in detail the divine ramifications of gay marriage.
Bryan Fischer, the American Family Radio host, said that God will use groups such as ISIS — or as he calls them, “the pagan armies of Allah” — to punish the U.S. for gay rights. Others claim that America is already being punished for gay marriage in the form of the California drought.
Another conservative radio host, Rick Wiles, has repeatedly predicted that America will be hit with a nuclear strike if not a “fireball from space,” while Lane, the right-wing political organizer, has been a bit more modest, claiming gay rights will only lead to divine punishment in the form of car bombings.
Others have claimed that planet Earth won’t survive gay marriage, as several right-wing pundits have fretted that gay marriage will bring about the Last Days. So let Pat Robertson explain how gay marriage will lead to our destruction:
