Rick Garnett is a very serious scholar of religious liberty.  In his view, acceptance of gay marriages — or at least their equal treatment with marriages recognized by Christian churches on campus — will be mandatory in the near future, a condition of federal funding.

“It seems to me very likely that, in the coming years, schools and universities that accept public funds and support will be required—as a condition of those funds—to have nondiscrimination rules that forbid discrimination on sexual-orientation grounds,” said Rick Garnett, a professor who oversees the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame’s law school, told The Atlantic. “And, these rules will not distinguish between sexual-orientation discrimination and non-recognition of same-sex marriages.”

It took just 17 years to go from Loving v. Virginia to an IRS ruling that Bob Jones University could not discriminate against interracial marriages.  How long before the small number of seriously theology-committed Christian schools face a loss of federal funding?

The First Amendment Defense Act needs to be passed in the first 100 days of the next GOP president.

Maggie Gallagher is a senior fellow at the American Principles Project.