Christian conservative Mat Staver has
predicted that marriage equality will lead to the “end of
civilization.”
Staver, who heads Liberty Counsel, a
group opposed to gay rights, appeared Tuesday on WND's Radio America
to discuss the recent Supreme Court decision not to hear appeals in
cases challenging gay marriage bans in five states, effectively
legalizing such unions in 11 states.
Staver warned that the inevitable
consequence of our “experiment” in advancing marital rights for
gay men and lesbians would be America's decline.
“When less people get married and you
have more children out of wedlock, when you destabilize the
institution of marriage, you make the economy poorer and you make the
society unstable,” Staver
said. “That’s exactly what we’re having and that’s what
we’re going to see here in America and around the world. When you
tinker with the very basic foundation of family and you assume that
gender doesn’t matter, you ultimately affect the rest of society
and the strength of civil government.”
“This is something that I believe is
the beginning of the end of western civilization. You can’t simply
redefine and pretend that ontological differences between men and
women do not exist. This will have consequences,” he added.
Such effects, however, have not been
reported in states with marriage equality, such as Massachusetts,
which legalized such unions in 2004. In fact, Massachusetts
has one of the nation's lowest divorce rates. Pollsters in Iowa
have found 64 percent of Iowans either
are proud or don't care about the issue.