The activist swarm pushing same-sex “marriage” (SSM) must be less than one percent of the population, far less than the total number of Americans who identify as gay. These are the activists who flood corporate human resources phone lines, launch media smear campaigns, flood website comment boxes, email death threats, ignite the Twitterverse and spike the Yelp ratings of targeted businesses. Compare that with at least a third of the adult population who still holds firmly to marriage reality and wishes to defend it. So why does this swarm intimidate so many corporate CEOs, small-business owners, Republican politicians, law firms, college administrators, religious leaders and even pro-marriage activists?

Answer: they don’t take on a hundred million people all at once. They pursue a disciplined strategy of focus, isolate and destroy. And they are well into the most vicious and revealing stage of their strategy.

After Indiana’s legislature and governor passed a religious freedom bill that might have allowed some business owners not to participate in same-sex “marriages,” a South Bend news crew spread out into the countryside to hunt for a Christian business. They found what they were looking for in the openly-Christian O’Connor family, who own Memories Pizza, in tiny Walkerton, Indiana (population 2,248). The O’Connors’ daughter told the news crew that while the pizzeria didn’t refuse people service, they would decline to cater a same-sex “wedding” because it contradicted their religious beliefs. The campaign against the O’Connors commenced immediately. You probably know the rest of the story.

At first, the family restaurant looked to be yet another casualty in the long war against marriage: a young photographer here, a 70-old florist there, a family pizzeria over yonder: these enemies of the state would be brought to heel one-by-one, forced to smile and say that war is peace, good is evil, and 2 men = 2 women = 1 man + 1 woman. Any retrograde Americans who claim otherwise would be isolated and eviscerated as a warning to anyone who might dare to speak that which may not be spoken: Try it, pal, and we’ll destroy you faster than you can say “Romans 1.”

Only this time, something else happened. Dana Loesch at The Blaze started a crowd-funding campaign at GoFundMe for Memories Pizza. (Crowdfunding refers to online platforms that allow the public at large to fund projects quickly without a lot of fuss and bother from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Popular platforms include GoFundMe, KickStarter, Indiegogo and others. Go here to see how it works.)

As a result, rather than destroying Memories Pizza, the swarm’s campaign ensured that the entire country heard of this little family-owned pizzeria. Memories Pizza now has more than $800,000 in new funds, which is a huge amount of money for a tiny mom-and-pop outfit.

Why did this happen? There are all sorts of worthy crowd-funding campaigns that don’t get off the ground and few that raise 8/10ths of a million dollars. This is surely evidence of a groundswell of support from Americans (including some fair-minded gay Americans) fed up with the tireless attacks not just against the institution of marriage, but against ordinary, culturally-powerless people trying to mind their own business.

In other words, the vicious attack motivated people to give to the funding campaign. A similar campaign for Baronelle Stutzman, the 70 year-old florist who dared to apply her convictions to her business, has raised $167,000.

Why can’t this be our strategy from now on? There are surely millions of Americans who will defend natural marriage whatever the cost, with the confidence that those who think they’re on the right side of history will someday collide with the left side of reality. We won’t all be intimidated. Let the SSM swarm and their media accomplices do the tedious market research for us. They’ll find the person of faith and conviction — the photographer, florist or food-truck owner in fly-over country. The swarm will gather over these individuals like a black cloud of locusts. And then tens of thousands of us will crowd-fund the victim.

The funding technology and communications infrastructure are already in place. Publicity is one of the hardest things to get for a crowd-funding project. For pro-marriage businesses, however, the SSM swarm provides the publicity for free.

The question is, do we have the resolve, the unity of purpose and the patience to reward those who stand strong against the war on marriage? If so, then we can make a difference. If not, then we are less committed to saving marriage than the swarm is to destroying it.