The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the four consolidated same-sex “marriage” cases, including Ohio’s Obergefell vs. Hodgeson, on April 28, 2015. As The New York Times reported, the first arguments were over same-sex marriage bans democratically enacted in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee, and thus concerned with whether states must allow same-sex marriage. The second set of arguments were concerned with whether a state must recognize a marriage of a same-sex couple that was performed in another state.

Many have said that if SCOTUS rules in favor of the plaintiffs, thus finding a right to same-sex marriage in the Constitution—namely in its 14th Amendment guarantees of due process and equal protection—it will short-circuit the democratic debate taking place in the states and set off another culture war similar to the one that followed its fateful decision 42 years ago in Roe vs. Wade to legalize abortion. The Court ruled 7–2 that “a right to privacy under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment extended to a woman’s decision to have an abortion…” That ruling also both energized a nascent pro-life movement and threw the pro-abortion community back on its heels. Liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself admitted as much in a May 2013 lecture and discussion at the University of Chicago School of Law, essentially claiming that Roe overreached, and that by doing so, it disrupted the democratic process that was working itself out in favor of abortion “rights” and women’s rights in the early 1970s (see more here).

But I’m not sure that this prediction of another culture war is correct—for four main reasons. First, abortion is not a person but a procedure—and a particularly violent one—that takes the life of an innocent human being. Hence, after Roe, pro-lifers were able to emphasize the utter brutality of the abortion procedure, while also demonstrating compassion for the mother, e.g., by creating thousands of crisis pregnancy centers to care for moms and their babies. As well, technology was progressing to such an extent that it was becoming more and more difficult to deny that what was developing in the mother’s womb was anything but a separate and unique human life. Sonograms were giving mothers a “window into the womb.” Even an immoral technology such as IVF-with-embryo transfer made that biological fact crystal clear in a petri dish.

With gay marriage, however, it’s more difficult to appeal to people’s sense of outrage, say, over a tiny life violently snuffed out before birth. We’re no longer talking about a grisly procedure any more, but the “rights” of flesh-and-blood gay people, primarily so-called “marriage equality.” These are the people that the gay activists keep reminding us are our family members, friends, neighbors and colleagues. It was and is easier to be called “anti-abortion”—even regarding it as a badge of honor—than to be portrayed as an “anti-gay bigot”, despite one’s protests to the contrary that you truly “love the sinner but hate the sin.”

Moreover, the gay rights movement has often wisely portrayed their efforts as a conservative one. It claims to desire, simply as a matter of fairness, what heterosexual couples’ desire: the institution of marriage. This appeal to the institution resonates among many in the culture. Far from sounding radical, i.e., as a redefinition of marriage, it sounds downright “mom and apple pie-ish.” Of course it is radical. But many in the culture have been fooled by the PR of the slick slogan “marriage equality.”

Finally, in the four-plus decades since the Roe decision, our society has become more secular—at least our elites in the media, entertainment, government and academia have—so that those of us who uphold the traditional view of marriage as a heterosexual union can no longer count on the culture for at least a modicum of support. And social media has tended to marginalize those who hold the conjugal view of marriage.

I hope and pray that SCOTUS holds back from redefining marriage. But if they don’t, I also hope and pray that I am dead-wrong in my analysis that the culture won’t challenge it. I do know that many Christians and other people of good will won’t let it go unchallenged. They will be like the young activists who stood outside of the Supreme Court on the day of oral argument, letting their voices be heard in defense of marriage as a union of one man and one woman. One of them, Ryan Bomberger, co-founder of the pro-life Radiance Foundation, stated “None of this has to do with equality. It has to do with others’ ideology being forced upon us and for us to accept it.”

Bomberger, who is black, said he was conceived in rape, adopted, and raised “in a very diverse home.” The 14th Amendment, he argued, was about the rights of freed slaves in the South, and no right to same-sex marriage can be found there. Nor, he added, can it be construed “to affirm every single behavior known to humankind.”

Mark S. Latkovic, S.T.D. is a Professor of Moral Theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary (Detroit, MI), where he has taught for over 23 years. He is co-editor of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law Tradition: Contemporary Perspectives (The Catholic University of America Press, 2004), as well as author of What’s a Person to Do? Everyday Decisions that Matter (Our Sunday Visitor, 2013) and numerous articles in scholarly and popular journals.