In short, there is nothing live-and-let-live about the way this movement has operated the past few years, and to pretend otherwise requires a willful blindness. Now, with Obergefell, the full furies have been released.

As Justice Samuel Alito suggested in his dissent, thousands of Americans who never dreamed that the issue would affect them will soon get highly personal lessons in how the legalization of same-sex marriage by judicial fiat threatens their schools, their institutions and even their livelihoods. This is not your father’s culture war.

A century ago, another Supreme Court justice famously wrote that the Constitution “is made for people of fundamentally differing views.” How far we have traveled since.

Those seeking to crush all dissent from the new judicial orthodoxy on marriage will not always win, not least because the right to the free exercise of religion—in bald contrast to Mr. Kennedy’s right to dignity—is in fact in the Constitution. Still, however individual cases may turn out, by foreclosing the option for democratic debate and compromise the Supreme Court has ensured a bitter national harvest.