Perhaps the most dire prediction right-wingers made in the first 15 years of this century was that legalizing marriage between two people of the same sex would end civilization.

No less than the pope warned that humankind was in peril because of countries legalizing marriage.

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Conservative org insisted straight couples would divorce in droves if marriage equality were legal
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“This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society,” said Pope Benedict in 2012. “Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself.”

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The pope wasn’t alone. In the U.S., former Arkansas Gov. and rightwing pundit Mike Huckabee said pretty much the same thing in 2007.

“You have to have a basic family structure,” he warned. “There’s never been a civilization that has rewritten what marriage and family means and survived.”

He gave no examples of any society that did not survive because it had a different understanding of marriage and family – which all cultures do.

As absurd as it sounds, this doomsday scenario was a widespread belief among the right in the years leading up to Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized marriage equality in all 50 states.

Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) – the infamous Republican who said that women can’t get pregnant in cases of “legitimate rape” – said that banning same-sex couples from marrying was key to “preserv[ing] our civilization and society.”

“Anybody who knows something about the history of the human race knows that there is no civilization which has condoned homosexual marriage widely and openly that has long survived,” he said in 2006, a year before Huckabee, without getting all that much attention for it because the idea that a nation of over 300 million people will somehow “fail” if same-sex couples can marry was just a totally normal thing that Republicans said at the time.

The Obergefell decision is turning 10 years old, and LGBTQ Nation is looking back at some of the predictions made by the right about what would happen if marriage equality were legalized, checking to see if they came true, and examining why they didn’t if they were indeed wildly inaccurate. And no prediction from that time was quite as dire as “letting two ladies or two dudes marry will end civilization.”

It’s not clear what that meant exactly or how it would happen. Is “civilization failure” everyone dying? A collapse of the government? An end to the trappings of modern society, like electricity and international trade? Or is it just society changing in a way that the speaker doesn’t like?

And how would it happen, exactly? Sometimes, the right would get more specific about the mechanism – and it was God.

“Society cannot long survive this kind of violence done to its basic values, and history surely shows many societies like Ancient Greece, whose rapid decline was preceded by the proliferation of the gay lifestyle and its public acceptance,” said Rev. Thomas Euteneuer, president of Human Life International, in 2010.

“We are called to be faithful and obedient to the Plan of God for our world, and within that, God will bring forth the victory. There is no doubt that, if it is not already there, gay marriage will be coming to your state soon. If we don’t fight it, our souls, our families, and basically, our very civilization, will find themselves at ‘the end’ of the line in very short order.”

Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), who famously compared homosexuality to bestiality, made more of a psychological argument, saying that marriage rights for same-sex couples make marriage lose “its special place.” And if straight couples don’t think that their marriages are “special,” they won’t get married, won’t have kids, and thus, civilization will end.

“The institution of marriage is already under assault. So why should we do more to discredit it and harm it?” he told Pew in 2008.

“Marriage is a society’s lifeblood,” he wrote in a column in 2012 that largely argued that marriage is for procreation. “Not everybody can or will marry, but all of us (married or not) depend on marriage in a unique way. Marriage is foundational: it creates and sustains not only children but civilization itself. This is an institution which protects our liberty.”

Well, it’s been ten years. Has civilization ended? The news this year might give people a sense of doom, but it’s hard to see how civilization could be described as failed or ended, considering most people are still going about their lives as they did a decade ago.

The omnipresence of this prediction may suggest that people perceive extreme predictions, such as the fall of civilization, as abstractions that they don’t expect to be related to their lived experiences. The idea of civilization failing isn’t just big, it’s too big, so big that it becomes abstract, not something that people feel a need to prepare for because it’s not real. It’s just something the Christian right says that people shouldn’t think about too hard.

And, ultimately, people were largely not convinced that it would happen, as support for marriage equality shot up during the 2010s, which likely wouldn’t have happened if people were actually worried about the future of civilization.

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