Dr Keith Ablow – a psychiatrist and medical contributor for Fox News – has published a long diatribe against equal marriage.

“More than a year ago, when states began to legalise gay marriage, I argued that polygamy would be the natural result,” Ablow wrote in a column for FoxNews.com. “If love between humans of legal age is the only condition required to have the state issue a marriage licence, then it is irrational to assert that two men or two women can have such feelings for one another, while three women and a man, or two men and a woman, cannot.

“I have met would-be polygamists who cohabitate as groups and I can tell you that they seemed to be very committed to one another, to be very intimate and to be ‘in love’.”

Linking equal marriage with polygamy, Ablow said: “Gay rights groups criticised me for suggesting that their bid for marriage rights would lead to polygamy being green-lighted.

“I received threats of being raped and being killed from gay people who didn’t like the point I was making and seemed to think I should be brutalised or die for it.”

Albow continued: “Well, now US District Court Judge Clark Waddoups has found parts of Utah’s anti-bigamy law unconstitutional. His ruling comes in a case brought by Kody Brown and his four wives, who are featured in the reality TV show, ‘Sister Wives.’

“I believe the US Supreme Court will uphold that finding, if Utah challenges it.

“As I predicted, this will officially make marriage the Wild West, in which groups of people can assert that they are married and should have all the benefits of that status, including family health plans and the right to file taxes as married people.

“It will also, eventually, lead to test cases in which a few unusual sisters and brothers insist that they can marry, because they are in love and promise not to procreate, but, instead, to use donor eggs or sperm. And, I predict, the courts will agree with them.”

He concluded: “Marriage is over.

“It was always at least a little funny that a huge percentage of people swore to stay together until death, then divorced and remarried.

“But, now, it is, officially, judicially, a joke.

“If two men can marry, and three men can marry, and five women and a man can marry, and three men and two women can marry, then marriage has no meaning.

“It’s over. Go get rings, go get lawyers, go rent a nice hall, but City Hall should bow out.”