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.