If the logic of same-sex marriage as a constitutional right is pushed to the limit — and its giddy supporters show no sign of restraint, looting the culture like a horde of victorious Vikings — the federal government could soon strip orthodox churches of their tax exemptions. Then they’ll send church leaders the bill for hundreds of millions of dollars. Property taxes will be assessed on cathedrals and soup kitchens, on hospices and pregnancy shelters, on nursing homes and universities. School principals will pay business tax on the tuition scraped together by low-income families to shoestring religious schools, so they’ll have to raise it or close them. The money you give to your church will not be tax deductible — as it would have been if you gave it to Planned Parenthood. The state will treat your tithes the same as the money you lost in Vegas; perhaps you can write some of it off as an “entertainment expense.”

And I wonder what the leaders of our churches will do. I speak here as a Catholic, though I’m sure that my Protestant brethren are wrestling with their own set of anxieties. I was cheered when the Sunday after the same-sex marriage decision, the bishop here in Dallas had a statement read in all parishes, reaffirming our church’s commitment to natural, biblical marriage. But I have been less than inspired by other things that I’ve seen. On Fox News, Bill O’Reilly complained that his producers had approached bishop after bishop, seeking some spokesman to give the Church’s position. No one would do it.

There’s a palpable fear of Caesar at work here, but also something else. I am trying to figure out what that “x factor” is.

Explain for me, someone, the response of progressives’ dreamboat Chicago Archbishop Cupich to the same-sex decision: Along with a pro forma restatement of church teaching, he reasserted the need for “real, not rhetorical” respect for homosexuals and promised to “extend support to all families, no matter their circumstances, recognizing that we are all relatives, journeying through life under the careful watch of a loving God.” He made no mention of the court’s challenge to religious liberty.

What’s going on in London, where the Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster, the leader of Britain’s Catholics, approved a group of “Catholic” gay activists marching in London’s gay pride parade? His spokesman explained that their presence was a form of “evangelization.” Could that well-paid church bureaucrat keep a straight face as he said that? How beaten-down, docile, or foolish does he think we Catholics are? Do Catholic civil-rights groups march arm-in-arm with the Klan as an evangelistic enterprise?

It’s alarming to recall that several prominent bishops at the last Synod on the Family proposed language that would have undermined Catholic teaching on this subject at its root, asking that the Church recognize the special gifts that gay Catholics bring by virtue of their sexual orientation. That language was mercifully struck from the final draft of the document, but those bishops were not disciplined, or even publicly corrected. Indeed, they recently held a secret meeting planning their strategy for the next Synod.

The bishops acted forthrightly against the HHS mandate, which demanded that Catholic institutions underwrite their employees’ use of contraceptives, including abortifacients. It was brave but a no-brainer, since unborn lives were involved. That factor attracted support from many Protestant churchmen, and brave owners of businesses such as Hobby Lobby. Everyone accepts the fact that Catholic bishops oppose abortion, and they would have been utterly discredited had they done anything else.

But I wonder, really wonder, what bishops will do in this case, if the Feds insist that they hire people in same-sex “marriages” to teach in Catholic schools, and then that they perform same-sex weddings in their churches — or else pay tens of millions of dollars in taxes on their property.

Few noticed the reaction when the Obama administration insisted that non-profit groups who receive federal contracts must comply with non-discrimination rules, and hire openly gay employees, including those in same-sex marriages. This order seemed to threaten lucrative partnerships with the federal government, especially the bishops’ involvement in resettling immigrants.

Our bishops condemned the order, but I have been unable to find the names of any Catholic federal contractors who lost government business rather than comply. (Perhaps they exploited the loophole in the order allowing church agencies to refuse to hire gays for specific jobs germane to the “religious identity” of the agencies.) Catholic Charities, which since 1997 had pressured the church in San Francisco to offer benefits for domestic partners, responded by announcing it was pleased with the order, and already in full compliance. Catholic Relief Services condemned the order, but a year later we learn that a vice-president of Catholic Relief Services is a gay activist who has contracted a same-sex “marriage.”

Bill O’Reilly cited the sex abuse crisis as a possible source of bishops’ reticence to speak out in defense of religious liberty. He wondered if they thought their credibility was too tainted, given that as of 2002, two-thirds of U.S. bishops had been implicated in cover-ups. I disagree; the bishops seem quite unabashed about intervening in U.S. politics when it comes to poverty programs and immigration. But many bishops’ behavior in the sex abuse crisis does give us an ominous hint about how they might act in the current crisis.

As prosecutors argued in court summation arguments and internal church documents reveal, the best explanation of bishops’ appalling failure to remove and report sex abusers is simple: worldliness. When confronted with middle-aged men who seduced vulnerable teenagers, their reaction was to worry about the church’s bottom line. If they didn’t stifle this secret, would they be subject to lawsuits? Would the church’s reputation suffer, and would donors divert their money elsewhere? What would happen to their diocese’s insurance premiums? At all costs, at the cost of countless ruined lives, of young souls twisted and alienated from Christ, these bishops acted to save the bricks and mortar. And in an irony worthy of Dante, that very choice cost them hundreds of millions of dollars.

The bishops could soon face a much more ominous threat to their finances, and instead of tort lawyers they would be threatened by the full force of the U.S. federal government. Will they stand firm and risk those magnificent Gothic buildings, those vital health care centers, that network of schools that serves the urban poor? Or will they tell themselves that the really “Christian” thing to do will be to listen to the culture, to maintain their mission as best they can by tweaking their public witness, to save not souls but bricks and mortar?

It might just take a miracle to keep the Catholic hierarchy in America on track with the church’s perennial teaching on marriage. But all things are possible with God. (“If the Feds Demand Same-Sex Marriage, What Will Our Pastors Do?”, originally posted HERE)

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There is simply no other way to say it.

The Supreme Court’s decision today redefining marriage to include couples of the same sex is wholly illegitimate and unlawful. A nullity. Worthy only to be disobeyed.

Anyone who says otherwise — that the rule of law requires recognition of same-sex marriage — is committing a fraud. And any State official — like Governor Robert Bentley of Alabama — who says that his oath of office requires unconditional obedience to the Supreme Court’s mandate to issue same-sex couples licenses to marry is mistaking his oath to the Constitution as if it were an oath of absolute obedience to five justices who happen to be sitting on the nation’s highest court.

As Chief Justice Roberts in dissent has described the action taken today:

“Five lawyers have closed debate and enacted their own vision of marriage as a matter of constitutional law. Stealing this issue from the people ….”

And just who are these lawyers? Justice Scalia reminds us that they are all educated at either Harvard or Yale, from the east- and west- coasts, not from the vast middle of the country, and not a single one an evangelical Christian or a Protestant, and then observes:

“The strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s upheaval would be irrelevant if they were functioning as judges, answering the legal question whether the American people had ever ratified a constitutional provision that was understood to proscribe the traditional definition of marriage.”

Indeed, from the outset of his bare majority decision, Justice Kennedy did not even act like a judge. Rather, he wrote as if he were an existentialist philosopher seeking the meaning of life, as if the “liberty” protected in the Constitution was a personal quest “to define and express [one’s personal] identity.”

But the Constitution is not some philosophical work written by Jean Paul Sartre. Rather, it is a political and legal document designed by America’s founders to secure the unchanging God-given rights to life, liberty, and property which are deeply rooted in the 18th century soil of the nation. Justice Kennedy showed no regard for these fixed principles, opting for an evolutionary approach to law — asserting that the existential definition of marriage changes with changing times.

However, the very purpose of our Constitution is, as Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Marbury v. Madison, to make “permanent” those principles that the people desired. And, so that those principles would not be “mistaken or forgotten,” the people committed them to writing.

Thus, Marshall wrote “it is the province and duty for the courts to say what the law is,” not to make it up as we go along.

As today’s dissenting Chief Justice observed, “[t]hose who founded our country would not recognize the majority’s conception of the judicial role”:

“They after all risked their lives and fortunes for the precious right to govern themselves. They would have never imagined yielding that right on a social policy to unaccountable and unelected judges. And they certainly would not have been satisfied by a system of empowering judges to override policy judgments so long as they do so after ‘a quite extensive discussion.’”

And, as the capstone of his dissent, the Chief Justice concluded: “the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.” In those nine simple words, Chief Justice Roberts explained why this decision of the Court is not law. If the Constitution had nothing to do with it, the Court had no jurisdiction to issue it. It is, therefore, a nullity.

In the words of Justice Felix Frankfurter, a brilliant jurist who understood the dangers of hubris on the highest court in the land — may Obergefell v. Hodges prove to be a “derelict on the waters of the law.” And it will be — but only if the American people rise up and resist this gross perversion of the rule of law.

Approximately one month ago, the U.S. Justice Foundation began to organize the writing and publication of a series of articles in a series entitled “Building the Resistance to Same-Sex Marriage.” This project was undertaken in the hope that the Supreme Court would not recklessly decide the same-sex marriage case, but nonetheless, we prepared for the worst, and sadly, the Supreme Court has disappointed us again. Hopefully over the coming weeks and months, state and local government officials and the people at large will be able to draw from these articles justification and techniques to resist the Supreme Court’s lawless decision.

In Article II, we established that the Fourteenth Amendment in no way addressed the issue of same-sex marriage. In Article III, Robert Reilly explained how poorly these cases have been litigated by government lawyers supposedly defending same-sex marriage. In Article IV, Pastor James Taylor explained the biblical and moral basis for traditional marriage. In Article V, Houston attorney J. Mark Brewer anticipated how courts will manipulate today’s rulings to penalize those in business and the professions who embrace biblical marriage. In Article VI, former Congressman John Hostettler explained that if a soldier has the duty to disobey an unlawful order, how could a state official not have that same duty? In Article VII, former federal magistrate Joe Miller discussed why it would be a violation of federal law and judicial ethics for Justices Ginsburg and Kagan to participate in the decision, yet both did so today.

In Article VIII, Pastor Matthew Trewhella provided a historical context for Christian resistance by lower government officials to illegal actions by higher government officials, known as “The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate.” In Article IX, we discussed the apparent efforts of the Supreme Court to bury the motion for recusal filed by the Foundation for Moral Law so that Justices Ginsburg and Kagan could more easily disregard their duty. In Article X, constitutional attorney Edwin Vieira explained how decisions like today’s decision violate the Constitution’s “good behavior” standard, leaving them susceptible to removal. In Article XI, former U.S. attorney Tom Ashcraft laid out the process by which Congress can limit the jurisdiction of federal courts, using the power Congress was expressly given in the U.S. Constitution. In Article XII, Senior Virginia Delegate Robert G. Marshall discussed how Congress could immediately use the Appropriations Power to prevent implementation of an unlawful decision such as that issued today. And lastly, in Article XIII, former Oklahoma Representative Charles Key described the responsibility and duty of every citizen, when serving on a jury, to decide both the facts and the law in every case, known as jury nullification.

This series of articles has demonstrated that a Supreme Court decision mandating same-sex marriage would be illegitimate. As Blackstone said, it would not just be bad law; it would be no law at all. That decision has now transpired. These articles also demonstrate that the American people and our elected officials have many ways to resist the unconstitutional decision of the Court. The question now is, will our political leaders abandon the true Constitution to embrace the decision of the Court?

In the coming days we will continue to be releasing articles further discussing the justification for and techniques that can be used by Congress, state officials, and the American people to resist today’s unlawful decision. We urge supporters of traditional marriage to view today’s loss as a setback, but by no means a final decision of anything. The battle continues.

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Herbert W. Titus taught Constitutional Law for 26 years, and concluded his academic career as the Founding Dean of Regent Law School. William J. Olson served in three positions in the Reagan Administration. Together they have filed over 80 briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court, and dozens more in lower courts, addressing important public policy issues. They now practice law together at William J. Olson, P.C. They can be reached at [email protected] or twitter.com/Olsonlaw.

This article is part of a series on “Building Resistance to Same-Sex Marriage.” Please support this important work with a contribution to the U.S. Justice Foundation. Permission is freely granted to publish, copy, reproduce, distribute, or excerpt from this article for any purpose.