Gay activists weren’t the only ones celebrating after last Friday’s marriage ruling. Polygamists popped the cork on a little champagne of their own, as they wait their turn for nationwide acceptance under the court’s elastic definition of marriage. Like us, they knew that once the courts redefined marriage, Americans would have a legal foundation for almost any arrangement between consenting adults — a fact that polygamists are already testing.

Just four days after the Supreme Court’s decision, a Montana man drove up to the Yellowstone County Courthouse and applied for a marriage license for multiple wives. When the office turned him down, he said, what about marriage equality? “We just want to add legal legitimacy to an already happy, strong, loving family,” Nathan Collier told reporters. “All we want is legal legitimacy… We just want to give our marriage and our family the legitimacy that it deserves.”

Sound familiar? It should. This is exactly the same argument homosexuals made — and five justices ultimately endorsed. Of course, liberals never wanted to admit what was farther down the wedding aisle because they thought it would derail their own train. But privately, many knew that the two movement’s destinies were very much intertwined. In fact, they knew there was more historical and biological support for polygamy than two men getting married. Now, with “love” and “consent” as the only obstacles, proponents of group marriage can follow the LGBT playbook all the way to legitimacy.

Twelve years ago, Justice Antonin Scalia predicted exactly that in Lawrence v. Texas. With prophetic insight, he pointed to the threat to state laws “based on moral choices” against “bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution … adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity.” Anyone being intellectually honest knew this was where liberals were pushing America. Of course, the media for years laughed off groups like FRC who warned that the Left’s goal isn’t same-sex “marriage” but any kind of marriage.

In the aftermath of last Friday, some liberals are finally doing us a favor by admitting it. We talked earlier this week about the Politico piece, “It’s Time to Legalize Polygamy,” in which Fredrik DeBoer predicts that group marriage will be normalized even faster. The Left is, DeBoer writes, “without exception, accepting of the right of consenting adults to engage in whatever sexual and romantic relationships they choose, but oppose the formal, legal recognition of those relationships. They’re trapped, I suspect, in prior opposition that they voiced from a standpoint of political pragmatism in order to advance the cause of gay marriage.”

Besides, he argues, “If my liberal friends recognize the legitimacy of free people who choose to form romantic partnerships with multiple partners, how can they deny them the right to the legal protections marriage affords?” Of course, once the article started getting a lot of attention — and Americans started having second thoughts — Politico raced to downplay the argument. A day later they cranked out a rebuttal, “No, Polygamy Isn’t the Next Gay Marriage.”

But who could possibly take them seriously? First, the Left said they just wanted to “live and let live.” Then, they said they just wanted benefits — not marriage. When liberals got marriage through the courts, they vowed not to force it on the states. After they forced it on the states, they said it wouldn’t lead to religious persecution. Now, when clerks are being threatened with jail time and Christians bakers are being fined $135,000, they claim there’s no slippery slope to polygamy. But after a track record of such intentional deception, who could (or should) believe them?

We Can Clerk It Out!

If you’re wondering what could possibly stand between same-sex “marriage” and America, try hundreds of county clerks. Liberty Institute says “hundreds” of emails are streaming in from local officials who refuse to issue licenses to gay couples or participate in the unions that violate their faith. In Nebraska, a single clerk in Sioux County may be all it takes to trigger the state’s first lawsuit. “I must warn you that this issue is a high priority for the ACLU,” its attorneys threatened Michele Zimmerman, “and we will consider legal action to enforce the law.”

Unfortunately, that scenario is already playing out all over the country, as more Christians stand up and demand the same tolerance liberals already enjoy. Casey Davis, who is one of several clerks facing jail time in Kentucky for daring to believe what President Obama did three years ago, is lashing out at Governor Steve Beshear (D) for not providing “some relief” for state workers with moral objections. “I did not take an oath that said I would lay my personal feelings down to do this job nor will I ever do that,” Davis vowed. Like us, he shakes his head at the Beshear’s order that government employees ignore their First Amendment rights — especially on the eve of the Fourth of July, when Americans are supposed to celebrate their independence from tyranny. “To me, that puts me in a prison and it puts government on the wrong side of, as our Declaration [of Independence] states, the laws of nature,” Davis said in the letter.

Nearby Alabama has problems of its own, now that federal judges are trying to twist the arms of local courthouses. In many areas, the state had stopped issuing licenses altogether. But if that continues, the courts warn, more clerks face jail time, fines, and — as one LGBT activist promises — charges of contempt.

In Texas, where county officials are lucky to have the strong backing of their governor, Greg Abbott ® and Attorney General Ken Paxton, the outside persecution continues. Our friends at Texas Values are rallying behind Hood County’s Katie Lang after she started receiving death threats for her stand. In a statement, Katie was clear: “I am grateful that the First Amendment continues to protect the sincerely held religious beliefs of public servants like me. That has not changed since last Friday.”

Despite the fact that local officials are offering other clerks to serve same-sex couples, gay activists are on a mission to ruin Lang’s life, career, reputation, and sense of safety. Our good friend Jonathan Saenz refuses to let that happen. “We will not stand by and watch as LGBT radicals try to destroy the guarantees of the First Amendment of our Constitution and ruin the personal lives of Texans who support marriage between one man and one woman. We will not be silent. We will proudly rise up with the timeless colors of red, white and blue as our backdrop, for God and country.”

That’s the Way the Cokie Arguments Crumbles

The media is pretty adept at obituary writing. They’ve been publishing one for the social conservative movement for more than four decades — desperately hoping to make it true. Not surprisingly, the Supreme Court’s marriage ruling has given them another opportunity to eulogize our cause, and many outlets have seized the chance. In particular, they point to polling and suggest that true, well-rounded conservatism will never survive in a culture where gay marriage is so overwhelmingly popular.

The trouble is, gay marriage isn’t quite as popular as they think it is. If you don’t believe me, look at the county clerks! More Americans than ever are disgusted by — not just the legalization of same-sex “marriage,” but how it was achieved: by five judicial activists disenfranchising the votes of 50 million. Of course, there’s no shortage of post-ruling surveys in which liberals have orchestrated the questions to produce the support for the Court’s decision it wants. But others, like [Wednesday’s] Barna polling, paint a less rosy picture of the Court’s radicalism.

The country is deeply divided on whether the justices did the right thing by sweeping aside thousands of years of human history, human nature, and the democratic process. Still, the media’s Cokie Roberts claims that the “tide of public opinion is shifting so strongly that gay marriage is rapidly losing its ability to disturb and divide the American electorate.” If that’s so, why are the Republican candidates and GOP leaders around the country rushing to marriage’s defense? Surely, if this were such an open-and-closed-case, these campaigns would turn the page on marriage in the name of political expediency.

The truth is, and our own polling has confirmed it, conservatives are just as opposed to same-sex “marriage” now as ever. In fact, new Pew research shows that the gap is even widening between Generation X and Millennials on the subject. As they have for decades, once teenagers (many of whom are conditioned by the culture to rebel against their parents’ values) grow up and have families, they tend to rethink their “anything goes” philosophy.

And as far as Republicans and evangelicals are concerned, they’ve barely budged. Marriage still factors strongly into their decision-making when considering candidates on any level. And more will almost certainly follow once they see the devastating consequences like polygamy, and the loss of free speech, religious liberty, and livelihood. Cokie claims that the long-term debates over abortion and marriage are different because “abortion has tangible, identifiable victims.”

I encourage her to log on to FreeToBelieve.com to see just how tangible and identifiable the victims of same-sex “marriage” are. As with abortion, more Americans will come face-to-face with these victims and their stories over time. Perhaps even faster with marriage, as the ruling steamrolls across the country, crushing parents’ rights, religious charities, faith-based schools, tax exemptions, people’s livelihoods, wedding businesses, and others. Unfortunately for Roberts, who is not alone in underestimating the fallout — and conservatives’ opposition — public opinion on same-sex “marriage” has nowhere to go but down.

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This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.