From Don Feder’s latest column over at WorldNetDaily:

Memo to conservative defeatists: Surrender on gay marriage is surrender on marriage – which is surrender on the family and, ultimately, surrender on civilization...

Offering competing models, socially sanctioned, undermines heterosexual marriage. Two men engaged in what used to be described as unnatural acts, become the legal/moral equivalent of a man and woman (husband and wife), joined by faith and tradition, doing society's essential work of childbearing and child-rearing.

Schools will teach that any living arrangement is as good as any other. Employers will be forced to provide "family benefits" to same-sex couples, regardless of religious scruples.

The state will be required to place children with gay couples for adoption, – depriving them of the father/mother role models necessary for successful adjustment. In Massachusetts, Catholic Charities ended its adoption program (the largest in the state), rather than submitting to placing children with homosexuals, as required in the nation's first gay-marriage state.

Ultimately, gay marriage will put churches and Bible-believers in the crosshairs – including Beck's LDS Church, which was viciously attacked for supporting Prop. 8.

Homosexual activists (among the most driven ideologues on the planet) will insist that all churches perform same-sex ceremonies – and push for withdrawal of charitable tax status of those that refuse. Hate-crime laws will be applied to the ministers and priests who preach Leviticus or Romans 1:26-27. In Europe and Canada, clerics have been hauled before human-rights tribunals for defending their faith from the pulpit. . . .

How can you have a strong economy without strong families? As economist Ludwig Von Mises noted, deferred consumption is necessary for capitalism to work. That means individuals willing to sacrifice for the future – and that means families.

Without the family, it doesn't matter how many times we defeat socialism (nationalized health care, government takeover of business, soaring deficits, redistributionism), in the end, we lose – which is why the left has made same-sex marriage its priority, and why it is less tolerant of dissent here than anywhere else.

Conservatives who don't understand this understand nothing.