Now that we’ve had time to digest the marriage poll and Mr Turnbull has leapt into action with uncharacteristic decisiveness to turn the result into law, we might pause to wonder what happened to all the outrage, the screaming at the sky, the attempts to storm parliament.

Where were the shrieking mobs of sapphics with their bib-and-brace denim and turkey-baster kids in strollers and the gays with their rainbow hair and hot pants and their whining about ‘love’? Where were the Fairfax editorials about the nation’s shameful ‘homophobia’? Where were the howls of anguish at ‘justice denied’, the sobs (we had Penny Wong’s tears, but they were tears of joy)? Where were the allegations of missing votes, the rainbow flags at half-mast on public buildings, the threats and warnings of suicide?

Nowhere of course. We would only have had that if the poll result had been No. We didn’t get it because the side that won the marriage consultation was the side the Left was backing. No voters aren’t the kind to take to the streets or whinge in the public prints. At worst they are silently depressed, otherwise just philosophical. It’s a sad result, not least because it unpicks one more thread in the unravelling fabric of Judaeo-Christian Australia. Not sad for the Left though.

The many Yes voters who are not leftists should bear in mind that they have done the Left’s work for it. The unctuous blather about ‘marriage equality’ was a trap. It was a lie to appeal to people’s instinctive notion of fairness. Millions of non-leftist voters fell for it, voting Yes because they thought it was a bit hard on the poor old Gs and Ls not to be able to marry like ‘normal’ (that forbidden word) Aussies, and anyway, what harm could it do? They will soon see.

The Prime Minister, who describes himself as a Roman Catholic so ought logically to be in the No ranks, airily dismisses the threats to religious freedom in the proposed new nuptial law. But how long before anyone expressing the conventional Christian view that gay ‘marriage’ is not real marriage will be had up for ‘hate speech’? It came within a hair’s breadth of happening in Tasmania even though the law itself held the same view.

How long will ‘religious ministers… and religious organisations’ be allowed to continue ‘to refuse to conduct… same-sex weddings’ once the new law is in place and the gay-Left alliance can stop pretending to be tolerant? Mr Turnbull has already assured any bridal-wear merchants, florists, photographers, caterers etc. who object to wedding bells for gays that their consciences will be overridden in the sacred name of ‘anti-discrimination’. Can anyone believe that the clergy will remain the sole exemption, especially if Shorten gets in?

As in all Leftist campaigns, what is demanded is only the tip of the iceberg. Once that is conceded, the mask falls and the demand is transformed into insistence that whatever was demanded become the universally imposed norm. It happened with abortion, it’s happening with euthanasia and it will happen with same-sex ‘marriage’ (the inverted commas will soon be illegal too).

Before we know it the street-shriekers will be out in force and the ABC-Fairfax propaganda machine cranked up for a new crusade: ‘Stop privileging religious bigots’. Magda Szubanski, whose career has revived like a watered flower thanks to the Yes campaign – she’s ‘loved by everyone’, according to the Melbourne Age, for ‘energising and encouraging gay communities’– will turn on the tears again, and that will be that.

(Actually, I nearly forgot, there will be one religious persuasion exempted from the general persecution, even though it’s not only anti-gay ‘marriage’ but anti-gay in general. Now which could that be? Here’s a clue: one of its members is a TV darling of the Left who has been as quiet on ‘marriage equality’ as Magda has been loud.)

Christian clergy who wish to avoid being asked to officiate at the unions of vexatious gay couples out only to denounce them when they refuse should resign their licences as state-authorised celebrants now. The alternative may well soon be prison.

Let there be two systems, as in France, with religious marriage a non-statutory sacramental ceremony for church members. Not that all clerics are opposed to same-sex ceremonies. The desperate-to-be-relevant type can’t wait, like the minister at Melbourne’s right-on St Michael’s Uniting church, who wants gay church weddings authorised as soon as possible by his denomination (presumably for fear that, given the last census figures, it will cease to exist first).

This minister somewhat unecumenically dismissed as ‘absolute nonsense’ a pastoral latter from Melbourne’s Roman Catholic archbishop urging a No vote. Here’s a straw in the wind. The Left knows that the Catholic Church is the only serious obstacle to the full implementation of its social agenda and has sought to discredit it by any means possible (helped, shamefully, by misfit Catholic priests who preyed on children). Stand by for a renewed assault to bring the Catholic Church to heel – force it to employ gay ‘spouses’ in schools, bring its rule of male-only clergy under ‘equal opportunity’ law, oblige priests to make video recordings of confessions. The secularist Left will have a field day.

The leftist social agenda is a wide and dangerous one, and it is here that the harm in having voted Yes will be fully revealed.

For ‘marriage equality’ was never really about marriage. It was and is part of a grand design to remodel society by annihilating the difference between the sexes; to make of every man and woman a blank canvas sexually, neutral ‘units’ whose genitals are of no more relevance to ‘gender identity’ than the colour of their hair, whose believing themselves men or women because that’s what they were born is a ‘social construct’.

Once any two of these units can marry, bang goes the bedrock of our civilisation as understood through the ages: the family with male and female father and mother. The Left hates families because it can’t control what goes on in them – their ‘kitchen table talk’, as our erstwhile Madame Defarge of the human rights Terror so memorably blurted out. The family must therefore be destroyed, so that social engineers instead can regulate what children are brought up to think. This strategy, cooked up over half a century by Marxist, ‘queer’ and feminist theorists, ‘Safe Schools’ weirdos and so on, is going from strength to strength.

Yes voters have handed it its greatest victory in this country yet.