You will be made to care about gay marriage. You may think it does not affect you or will not affect you or you can support it and leave well enough alone, but you cannot. The secular left and aggressive gay rights activists will not allow you to.

You must either fully embrace it or be shunned. You may think it does not affect your marriage, your life, or anything else, but you will be made to care — you will not be allowed to accept that others can disagree on the issue due to their orthodox faith. The slow march toward the destruction of the marital institution now picks up pace with Anthony Kennedy’s decision in Windsor. What is, at its heart, a tax case, became a vehicle for Kennedy to declare malicious intent on the preservation of marriage.

That’s clear from the decision. In the 90’s, the Defense of Marriage Act was enacted to preserve and recognize the traditional marital structure that the United States had had since its founding. But Anthony Kennedy declared that the purpose was ill will toward gays — ignoring that activists were seeking to upend the order of things as they had been.

This decision will be used to advance on the states. A muddled equal protection message will be used to force accommodations some are not willing to make and some cannot make because of their religion.

Luckily, we have been given time to erect firewalls. The Court’s decision leaves in place the portion of DOMA that allows states to refuse recognition to gay marriages performed in other states. That will fall in the next few years. Once that happens, there will be an even messier culture war designed to treat traditionalism as a noxious notion of a bygone era — the equivalent of Jim Crow.

Right now, while the left still denies that is the intention, the right should act. They should start codifying protections for religious institutions — from churches to schools. Those protections should include protections for the tax exempt status of organizations that refuse to recognize gay marriage and protections for Christian schools that do not want to treat gay marriage as an acceptable alternative to normal.

As I noted some time ago, gay marriage and religion are not compatible. “The left cannot take marriage out of government because for so long it has been government through which marriages were legitimized to the public and the left must also use government to silence those, particularly the religious, who refuse to play along.”

The gay rights movement has been very, very successful. But they have failed on the religious front. So the religious front cannot be accommodated. It must be made to yield.

There is one bright spot for Christians in America, though it will not appear so. Christianity in America has become soft. Persecution of the faithful will strengthen it as it has done for centuries. It will happen. We best prepare.

You will be made to care.