The expected Supreme Court decision imposing on 50 states an entirely new understanding of marriage, and the frenzy of hatred that gay activists have stoked against Indiana for trying to shelter religious believers from crippling lawsuits should wake us to a cold and stark reality: The age of tolerance in America is vanishing before your eyes. The question is how Christians and other people of faith and good will are going to respond.

Let’s break this down in stark and simple terms: Not only were gay activists willing to overturn an act of Congress (the Defense of Marriage Act) on spurious grounds; they also wish to force their libertine idea of marriage onto voters in each of the 50 states, voiding dozens of laws on an issue that has always rested with the states.

Not satisfied with that, these activists want the full force of the regulatory state to compel every single American to affirm and accept the delusion of same-sex “marriage,” under the same civil and criminal penalties that now forbid discrimination by race. A famous case was a 70-year-old Christian florist who declined to decorate a gay wedding, and was crushed by a successful lawsuit and the full force of the ACLU’s legal team. She was one of the Brave New Law’s first victims. She will be far from the last.

These activists use the power of city governments (as in San Francisco) to try to intimidate isolated Catholic schools into abandoning Christian teaching on sexual ethics. Such zealots corrupt the academic authorities who grant accreditation in order to financially cripple schools such as Gordon College that maintain Christian “morals” clauses as part of their hiring policies.

Those who defend the reality of marriage, including even unbelievers who defend freedom of religion and association, are not simply wrong — they are “bigots” and “haters” who deserve to be fined, boycotted and bankrupted; to lose their jobs like Brendan Eich, the ex-CEO of Mozilla, and face financial ruin — as Elton John hopes to break Dolce & Gabbana, and as Apple CEO Tim Cook hopes to break the entire State of Indiana. Politicians are joining in, with the Connecticut governor, and Seattle and San Francisco mayors, banning official travel to Indiana.

As Austin Ruse points out, states such as Indiana are not giving Christians a pass to broadly discriminate against gays. Such religious freedom laws “deal with the very narrow question of whether vendors can be forced by the state to participate in religious ceremonies that violate their own religious consciences.”

Given the fanatical response to a modest bill virtually identical to a federal law upheld by courts and bills on the books in twenty other states, how long before the call comes out for the “bigots” to be imprisoned? The First Amendment won’t protect us, if leaders like Hillary Clinton have their way; in public statements she followed President Obama in replacing the Constitution’s “free exercise” with “freedom of worship.”

The implicit message shouldn’t be missed: Say what you want in church for an hour every Sunday, but the rest of the week belongs to us. Your homophobic beliefs deserve no more protection than the religious use of peyote.

For Part II of this analysis, see Gay Totalitarianism and the Coming Persecution of Christians.