Yesterday on “Washington Watch,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins fielded a call from a listener who was responding to a segment about the purported harms of same-sex marriage by wondering why the government just doesn’t get out of the marriage business altogether. Perkins responded that the government must play a role in order to foster the wellbeing of children. The legalization of same-sex marriage, Perkins warned, will “exacerbate” societal problems like mass incarceration.

“Government has a vested interested in seeing those children grow up with a mother and a father,” Perkins said. “Now they’ve changed that policy, obviously, with this and we’re going to suffer the social consequences as a result.

“When you look at, for instance, our prison system today, and there’s a lot of effort, some of which I’m involved in, prison reform to try to scale back the prison population which is getting out of control, but 70 percent of most of the men in the prison have had little or no interaction with a father in their life. That’s why you saw about a decade and a half ago fatherhood initiatives. There is a direct correlation between increased social costs and the breakup of the family and this will only exacerbate that situation and take us further down this path.”

Earlier in the program, Perkins lamented that “logic, reason, history, social science, anthropology means nothing any more” to the Supreme Court justices who sided with marriage equality advocates last month. “If you read the majority opinion of the five judges, they discounted history, they discounted anthropology, they discounted the social sciences and reason to come to this decision.”

Perkins alleged that since the justices “ignored the Constitution” when they “trampled marriage and our First Amendment freedom of religion,” they will soon go after the freedom of speech and gun rights.

“Speech will not be far behind,” Perkins said. “And for my Second Amendment friends, and believe me I’m an ardent Second Amendment defender, that’s not going to be far behind either.”