These may all seem like dire and extreme predictions, just as predictions about courts imposing same-sex marriage did 10 or 15 years ago, but I ask you, if you are a supporter of same-sex marriage: what were you saying to yourself about my arguments just a few paragraphs ago? Were you resisting the idea that having a mother and a father is best for a child, or that any sensible person could think there’s evidence to support that? Were you saying to yourself that all this religious stuff is just cover for irrational bigotry? Were you telling yourself that everything I’m saying right now will go the way of the arguments for “separate but equal”? Because if you were telling yourself those things, and you want the courts to believe them (because believing otherwise means finding a rational basis for traditional marriage laws), you cannot well be surprised if the essential underpinnings of your argument end up as the law. And the engine of litigation never rests.

There is no requirement that the civil definition of marriage precisely track the religious definition; indeed, in a country that observes no religious establishment, it is often the case that the civil law is different from the religious. But when the law declares that two things are the same when they are not, and commands us to affirm and help celebrate a thing that is not so, its logic will inevitably compel us to conform our actions to that fiction.

This puts Christians to the test of their duty to avoid scandal. And when the law derides any request for respect for individual conscience as an invidious form of irrational bigotry, as many judicial opinions have done and as critics of religious-liberty bills have done, the stage is set for an existential struggle.

In a battle for liberty, Christians and gays can both win. But when the argument is over equality and the perspectives involved are in such dramatic collision, one side must sooner or later be found more equal than the other.