Before we begin, let’s use gmarriage to indicate government-defined-marriage, which is not actual marriage. The neologism allows us to save the language, a precious thing, while avoiding the tedium of scare quotes around locutions like same-sex “marriage.” The g is silent, as in gnostic.

Now we know that gmarriage is bad, and we know why. So here let’s discuss why it’s not just bad, but catastrophic.

What has happened in these once United States has already occurred in several other post-Christian societies. In every country with Christian roots that has mandated gmarriage, man declared himself to be God.

Hyperbole? Not in the least. Here’s why.

Men can be, and often are, confused over what is true and what false. This commonplace problem gives rise to two errors. One is to suppose that because uncertainty exists, truth does not. Think of Pontius Pilate’s infamous question, “What is truth?” From this error, the false philosophies of pragmatism and relativism arise. With these errors, “truth” is whatever the strongest people say it is.

The second error is to declare true whatever most people believe. But while man can discover truths, he cannot create them. Consensus does not determine truth. The belief that it does is the false philosophy of the Demos. The fundamental conceit of post-Christian democracies is that truth can be had by popular acclamation. The truth is whatever opinion gets the most votes.

Now since all truth flows from God, its ultimate and sole source, to declare truth to be our creation, to suppose that man’s flawed thoughts are the ne plus ultra, is to make ourselves God. And it is this desire to be God, or to be as God, that explains why we often find the rot deepest in societies which used to be Christian. It’s the Incarnation in reverse.

This decay is abetted by original sin: “… your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” That is to say, equality, or egalitarianism between man and God. Egalitarianism, that great force by which man pretends to lift himself into the Empyrean, was the catalyst necessary to activate the two philosophical errors and pervert truth in all countries, including our own, which have embraced gmarriage.

Justice Anthony Kennedy assumed this type of egalitarianism when he wrote that “children [under gmarriage] suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser.” As Justice Roberts noted in his dissent, Kennedy thinks that those holding to the true meaning of marriage are inegalitarian, that they “‘lock … out,’ ‘disparage,’ ‘disrespect and subordinate,’ and inflict ‘[d]ignitary wounds’ upon their gay and lesbian neighbors.”

To Kennedy, marriage is first and foremost a bond of love, and so, as many are now repeating, any who love can declare themselves gmarried. Egalitarians find it intolerable that any inequality exists, which is why gmarriage is called “marriage equality,” an otherwise empty term.

The final step for Kennedy and four other justices, as it was for the leaders in several other countries, was to invoke by force the desired outcome. Man creating truth.

What went unnoticed was that, in dissenting, Chief Justice John Roberts declared himself beholden to the second error, to the Demos. He correctly denounced Kennedy’s might-makes-right pragmatism by saying, “The majority’s decision is an act of will, not legal judgment.” Yet he also said, “The people of a State are free to expand marriage to include same-sex couples, or to retain the historic definition. …”

The people of any State have no such right. This is why is it odd that Roberts disparaged Kennedy and crew for “preferring to live only in the heady days of the here and now.” Because this is what the Demos (removed from its anchor) does. If The People can define truth, The People of next year are free to redefine last year’s “truth” however they like.

Kennedy made his error more than once. He assumed that it is the government that awards dignity, not God. Justice Clarence Thomas spotted this error, noting that the Court rejected the idea “that human dignity is innate and suggests instead that it comes from the Government. …” Instead, Thomas insisted: “The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.”

Then Thomas joined Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito, who wrote that the Court’s “decision usurps the constitutional right of the people to decide whether to keep or alter the traditional understanding of marriage.”

The four dissenters rightly condemned that truth can be mandated by force, yet their construction implied that a state could decide marriage was something it’s not simply by voting. A triangle still has three sides whether a court mandates or a country votes that is has four.

This is why gmarriage is worse than you thought. Gmarriage supporters had, as Roberts said, the “wind at their backs” and would have eventually won the day by acclamation, as they have in other post-Christian states. But the people would have been as wrong when they so voted as the Court was when it used force.

We may not need to wait for the Court to impose polygamy, and who knows what other horror, because a people that have consciously abandoned Christianity are just as likely to commit the same mistakes, unforced. We may still fear the Court, but we need to fear what we have become, and what we believe we have become. We need to fear the absence of Truth.