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In what proved a timely warning, he said that clashes would be inevitable if the core definition of marriage was changed to accommodate the whims of social activists and engineers who considered any opposition to their views as coming from “mere bigots.”

A fortnight later citizens in three U.S. states – Arizona, California and Florida – voted to support traditional marriage from being redefined, and the attacks that Wardle predicted became very much a reality. Violent demonstrations were launched by gay activists against Christian churches, companies and individuals that had urged a “yes” vote for traditional marriage.

The church that came under the most sustained attack was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or LDS, the dominant fundraising force in the California ballot to ban same-sex marriage, known as Proposition 8. Catholics and some Evangelical Protestants, like Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, were also targeted.

The initiative came about because an activist Supreme Court of California had ruled that an existing ban, enacted by referendum in 2000, was unconstitutional. Hence, the most populous U.S. state became a political battleground – and the LDS, allegedly, contributed up to 40 percent of the US$15.5 million raised in the campaign that prevailed, with 52 percent of the vote. Some sources attribute US $20 million to the LDS expenditure overall.

Since the rejection of the homosexual viewpoint in the three state ballot boxes, the LDS has come under sustained attack and vilification from activists who have labeled the church’s involvement as bigotry and prejudice at their worst.

In fact, it was a copybook example of democracy at work after the LDS and others put forward a logical and moderately expressed case for the support of traditional marriage.

Some of those well-reasoned arguments were patiently explained by Wardle to his large Australian audience.

He said that the defense of marriage was not designed as an attack on homosexual relations and lifestyle, but rather a defense and defining of marriage – period. Attempts to redefine marriage by activists, he said, would result in a very different social institution and effects. Hence such efforts were not a claim for marriage, but a claim to change marriage.

Wardle explained that marriage is not just a piece of paper, or a matter of legal positivism, but rather a pre-state and pre-legal institution. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one, nor does a union of two women make it a marriage in nature, characteristics or social consequences.

The issue was indeed a civil rights issue, but not as homosexuals would argue, Wardle said. Rather marriage was an inalienable feature of life and should not be the subject of judicial or legislative whim.

Same-sex marriage is presented as a claim for tolerance, but tolerance is quite difference from preference. “The law treats human relations in three ways: many relations are prohibited, others tolerated and a few are preferred and privileged.”

Wardle said that society had moved away from prohibition to tolerance on homosexual matters, but that conjugal marriage had always been given historical preference because it is the foundation of society. “The claim for same-sex ‘marriage’ moves beyond a claim for tolerance and seeks special preference,” he pointed out.

Such a claim, he said, was a “demonstrably false assumption … all relationships are not equal; marriage produces good and beneficial effects for individuals, children, families and society that are unmatched by the effects of all other relationships.”

The flow-on effect, if the homosexual push was successful, would undermine freedom of religion and speech while children in public schools would be taught the moral relativism of equivalency – and any argument with that “principle” would not be permitted.

In a prescient point he claimed defenders of marriage did not want controversy and division, but that “the advocates of radical redefinition and deconstruction of marriage have aggressively taken steps to change public law and policy and have forced the issue on us.”

The attempt to capture marriage is hardly new. The Nazis tried it with the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935 that prohibited marriage between Aryan Germans and the Jewish “untermenschen,” or subhumans. The professor reminded his audience that U.S. racial eugenicists had also used thuggish tactics to advance their program of racial segregation, which pervaded society in the U.S. South for a century after the end of the Civil War in 1865.

The defense of marriage has led to a thawing of relations between churches normally antipathetic to one another. Traditionally, evangelical Protestants have wanted little to do with the LDS church because of doctrinal differences. However, because of Mormon prominence in the marriage campaign new alliances have been forged.

San Diego pastor Jim Garlow was quoted as saying that had it not been for the campaign he would not have been meeting or talking with Mormons, but that despite theological differences he had developed friendships in the LDS fraternity. Just as Roman Catholics and Protestants came together on abortion matters, a similar process may occur with Mormons. That is the real story, and the one Jacobs misses or ignores.

As Wardle reminded his Fremantle audience, there are times when you have to stand up for what is right regardless of cost, and not just simply pass by on the other side like those who preceded the Good Samaritan.

The defense of marriage and the family is one of those times.

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(John Elsegood is a freelance journalist and a teacher of history and politics in Perth, Western Australia. He has never been a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. ©Copyright John Elsegood)