Judge William L. Downing did supporters of traditional marriage and President George Bush a favor this week.

By conjuring a right to gay marriage in the state of Washington, the King County Superior Court judge sounded the alarm that the attack on this basic institution has reached all corners of our country. Joe and Jane Citizen now know the assault on marriage isn’t something that happens in ultraliberal bastions like San Francisco, Hawaii and Massachusetts alone. Overreaching judges are trying to impose a radical social agenda on salt-of-the-earth residents of conservative Eastern Washington, North Idaho and the rest of Flyover Country.

Supporters of traditional marriage (most of us) should know by now that gay activists have sought out judicial rubber stamps, like Downing, to force their version on the country. They can’t win at the ballot box. Missouri proved that in an underplayed story this week.

Seventy-one percent of that battleground state voted to amend the state constitution to define marriage as it has been forever as the union of one man and one woman. Four other states, including Democratic Hawaii, have adopted similar amendments by supermajorities of 67 percent to 71 percent. And 10 other states are lined up to vote on marriage amendments this fall, including hotly contested Arkansas, Michigan and Ohio. Religious conservatives sat out the 2000 election in droves. With this issue on the ballot, they won’t.

As a result, Bush, who has eagerly endorsed a constitutional amendment to protect marriage, should reap a harvest of votes that could swing a close election – no matter how much Michael Moore, Linda Ronstadt, Alec Baldwin and other entertainment elite huff and puff.

Although America’s social engineers hailed Downing’s ruling, it’s nothing but a frontal assault on societal mores, designed to win government sanction and public acceptance for a risky lifestyle. For millennia, marriage has provided a safe haven to raise children with committed parents serving as role models. In America, the institution remains intact although it has been weakened by the “free-love ‘60s,” abortion on demand, which gives men an easy out when “safe sex” backfires, no-fault divorce, cohabitation and absentee parents.

Incredibly, Downing pooh-poohed the notion that traditional marriages of devoted parents produce healthier children.

“Although many, many hold strong opinions on the subject,” he wrote in his decision, “the fact is that there are no scientifically valid studies tending to establish a negative impact on the adjustment of children raised by an intact same-sex couple as compared with those raised by an intact opposite-sex couple.” He should have added the word “yet.”

Last month, five Dutch social science professors issued a statement tentatively linking the introduction of same-sex marriage in The Netherlands in the 1990s with the dramatic decline of traditional marriage and rapid rise of illegitimate births.

“People seem to attach less and less importance to marriage,” the authors wrote in calling for a national debate on how to strengthen marriage. “More people are having children out of wedlock, even though marriage is the best setting for successfully raising a child. There is a broad base of social and legal research that shows marriage to be the best structure for the successful raising of children. A child of out-of-wedlock parents has a greater chance of experiencing problems in his or her psychological development, health, school performance, and even the quality of future relationships.”

Most Americans, including religious conservatives like me, don’t care what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their homes – gay, bi, hetero, married, unmarried, whatever. But I do care that a tiny minority – with gale-force help from compliant judges, lawyers, actors and journalists – are foisting their beliefs about sexuality, marriage and family structure on a Judeo-Christian nation. In both testaments of the Bible, the marriage of a man and a woman is honored as the only acceptable norm, although kings of Israel, like David and his son, Solomon, fudged quite a bit and paid the consequences in endless familial strife.

America is almost at the bottom of the slippery slope. We’re in a moral stupor. We can’t distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, an institution of enormous social value from a dangerous counterfeit. Court-imposed gay marriage will lead to court-imposed polygamy, which will lead to court sanctioning of adult-minor relationships, which will lead to who-knows-what? A man marrying his dog?

Downing’s ruling provides further proof that this nation is in the midst of a fierce cultural war. It’s time for supporters of traditional values to insist that Congress approve a constitutional amendment protecting the historic definition of marriage. With so much at stake, activist judges can’t be trusted to set aside their prejudices and interpret law for the good of all the people.