According to Liberty Counsel head Mat Staver, if the Supreme Court rules in favor of marriage equality, America may head toward outright revolt and a second civil war. Staver told Janet Parshall that marriage equality will mean that the institution of marriage, freedom of speech and the freedom of religion will be “destroyed” and “bulldozed over.”
Like Family Research Council president Tony Perkins who last month maintained that the Supreme Court may start a “revolution” and “break this nation apart” by striking down gay marriage bans, Staver said that the court “could split the country right in two” as “this is the thing that revolutions literally are made of.”
“This would be more devastating to our freedom, to our religious freedom, to the rights of pastors and their duty to be able to speak and to Christians around the country, then anything that the revolutionaries during the American Revolution even dreamed of facing,” Staver said, “This could cause another civil war.”
Staver: Basically marriage will be completely destroyed, families will be destroyed, children will be hurt by this and freedom of speech and freedom of religion, including in the pulpit itself, will absolutely be bulldozed over. This would open a floodgate of unimaginable proportions. That’s why with those kinds of consequences to have five of the nine justices ultimately have this kind of power in their hands, that’s not how this court and this country was established, to have five individuals to be able to have that kind of catastrophic, social reengineering power in their hands, that’s just not something that was envisioned by the founders.
Parshall: Absolutely right. God hasn’t given us a spirit of fear but of power and of love and of a sound mind so we need to be in prayer, but I also think we need to be preparing our hearts as well Mat that if in fact the Supreme Court decides to trample underfoot the truth of God’s word, we as a church are going have to decide what we’re going to do. Mat, you know I’m going to appeal to your pastor’s heart, that means that every single pastor who is called to hold out the word of life is going to have to decide whether or not he is going to sidestep certain passages for fear of some sort of response from the government.
Staver: This is the thing that revolutions literally are made of. This would be more devastating to our freedom, to our religious freedom, to the rights of pastors and their duty to be able to speak and to Christians around the country, then anything that the revolutionaries during the American Revolution even dreamed of facing. This would be the thing that revolutions are made of. This could split the country right in two. This could cause another civil war. I’m not talking about just people protesting in the streets, this could be that level because what would ultimately happen is a direct collision would immediately happen with pastors, with churches, with Christians, with Christian ministries, with other businesses, it would be an avalanche that would go across the country.
He even argued that marriage equality laws “destroy the very foundation of our family” and have “catastrophic consequences,” including “the unraveling of the United States.”
Parshall: There is no ambiguity as to what the definition of marriage is. Here are nine people in black robes who are basically going to judge, and I’m going to put this in the vernacular of the common man, these are nine people who are basically going to say: God didn’t say that and here’s our ruling. I know I really distilled it down but you’ve got judges who are basically going to decide for us at the high level, potentially, how marriage should be defined. That’s amazing. Who would have thought we would ever find ourselves in that place?
Staver: It’s stunning. That’s why I am very concerned that this has made its way to the United States Supreme Court because only five of those nine can make a decision and so five people, potentially, in the United States, only five out of the hundreds of millions that we have, have in their hand this opportunity to literally wreck marriage, to destroy the very foundation of our family and the biblical definition of marriage. The consequences are staggering. This could be the Roe v. Wade of marriage and family. If we ultimately say as a court and if the country follows it that marriage is between two people of the same sex and it’s now how common sense, history and the Bible ultimately defines it, that has catastrophic consequences. That is staggering and it is actually something that we ought to be in significant prayer about because this could be the unraveling of the United States.