Regardless of what you think about last week’s Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, you have to admire the raw capitalistic pluck of the dozens of American corporations that decided, upon the majestic release of Justice Kennedy’s addled mandate from Mount Make-Up-A-Law, to immediately go full rainbow.

After the ruling — which cheered many Americans, but which also included an alarming cavalcade of disastrous, slapdash legal reasoning — social media transformed into a colorful, giddy sea. Companies like American Airlines, the Gap, and Uber candy-coated their logos. General Mills promoted the addition of “two new rainbow marshmallows” to Lucky Charms cereal, Nike launched the rainbow-hued “#BeTrue” collection, and Target stores whipped out racks of rainbow “pride gear,” featuring flip flops, iPhone covers, and swimsuits that looked like they had been hand-sewn by me, the night before, in the dark, after three glasses of wine.

Was it shameless, unabashed consumerism? A blatant jump on the cultural bandwagon? You bet. But really, could anything be more American? The sudden explosion of mainstream rainbow flotsam reminded me of a scene in Spaceballs, the late-1980’s Star Wars parody starring Mel Brooks. In it, the film’s four hapless, awestruck heroes meet up with Yogurt, a glitter-gunned Yoda knock-off who possesses not only the power to save the galaxy, but also the deepest secret of worldly success.

“Ha ha ha! Come,” the all-powerful Yogurt bellows, leading the group to a packed display counter surrounded by cloaked space elves and flashing lights. “Walk this way! Merchandising! Merchandising! Where the real money from the movie is made! Spaceballs the t-shirt! Spaceballs the coloring book! Spaceballs the lunchbox! Spaceballs the breakfast cereal!” Pause. “SPACEBALLS THE FLAME THROWER!”

Here’s the good news: The American ability to capitalize on almost everything in sight — including, not so long ago, a brief but glorious flurry of selling of actual rocks as pets — has made us very rich. Here’s the bad news: It has made the government, which specializes in sneakily taking your money away, even richer.

Sadly, Uncle Sam isn’t Warren Buffet rich, or even “crotchety multi-millionaire who leaves his thermostat locked at 58 degrees in January” rich. That, alas, would be too boring. Instead, Uncle Sam is Anna Nicole Smith rich, or, perhaps more accurately, M.C. Hammer rich. This is also known as “piles of regrettable purchases paired with one mysteriously empty giant money vat” rich, with one simple motto: “Wait, the money can run out?”

This approach, as history has shown, can lead to serious problems. Here in twenty-first century America, it allows us to spend other people’s money on a whole impressive host of, ahem, “interesting” things. We can, for instance, create glorious rainbow light shows over the White House, the Empire State Building and Niagara Falls! We can, according to a recent order from the Obama administration — sorry, make that last “can” a “must” — provide publicly funded medical treatments to turn people we don’t even know into the opposite sex! Also, just to keep things lively, we can also fund public school sex education programs that often bear a striking resemblance to the ultra-dignified stripper shows displayed in the movie Magic Mike!

If you doubt the appropriateness of any of the above, well, you’re still going to pay for it. Which is fine, theoretically: We live in a diverse country, and not everyone is going to agree on everything under the sun. The problem, however, is that it’s getting increasingly difficult to opt out of “the program” — and it seems that certain unpopular groups aren’t allowed to disagree.

On Monday, for instance, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled against a local voucher program, which allowed parents to send their children to the presumably Magic Mike-free private school of their choice. Just hours after the Obergefell Supreme Court ruling, meanwhile, numerous commentators pushed to yank tax-exempt status from churches or schools that disagreed with same-sex marriage. “We’ll let you practice your bigotry,” Felix Salmon wrote at Fusion, a website affiliated with NBC Universal, “at least within the confines of your own church. But we’re not about to reward you for doing so.”

Note the imperial-sounding “we”? It’s kind of strange and authoritarian, right? Who does Felix Salmon think he is, a crabbier version of Justice Anthony Kennedy? Even if you favor gay marriage, isn’t this “we’ll let you do this or that” rhetoric just a bit creepy?

Welcome to the culture wars, which have little to do with actual culture, and everything to do with harnessing raw government power. In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court decision, numerous commentators called on conservative Christians and other same-sex marriage “dissenters” to call the whole thing off. Here’s the weird thing: I suspect that many of them would if they could, at least in the political arena. Many Americans, after all, just want to mind their own business.

It’s the ever-growing government, weirdly, that won’t drop the topic — and it’s the ever-growing government, ultimately, that won’t let the culture wars die. If current trends continue, we can expect more of the same.

Heather Wilhelm is a writer based in Austin, Texas. Her work can be found at http://www.heatherwilhelm.com/ and her Twitter handle is @heatherwilhelm.

This column originally appeared at Real Clear Politics on July 2, 2015 and is reprinted with their permission.