Washington Times columnist Robert Knight joined Steve Deace on his radio program yesterday to discuss the showdown in Alabama over a federal court ruling striking down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage.

Knight lamented that “judges have gotten out of control” because state and federal lawmakers have failed to bring them “to heel” by impeaching judges who rule in favor of marriage equality.

“The reason judges have gotten out of control is because legislators have not protected their turf, they have not used the constitutional means to bring these judges to heel,” he said. “One of them is impeachment. At the federal level and at the state level, there are many ways judges can be removed. In Massachusetts, it would have been easy to remove the Supreme Court judges who found a right to gay marriage in the Massachusetts Constitution in 2004, but that would have taken Gov. Mitt Romney to go ahead and get the process going and he refused.”

He also blamed the “pro-family movement” for failing to address why homosexuality is “bad for people” and neglecting to lift up the stories of people “who have recovered and become straight.”

Deace told Knight that Republicans who think a Supreme Court ruling in favor of marriage equality would help them by putting aside a contentious issue are wrong, and that the ensuing national debate would

“make Roe v. Wade look like a picnic.”

“This is going to go DEFCON 1, DEFCON subterranean, because now we’re going to be in an issue where the other side of the argument now thinks they are empowered and emboldened to unleash the full coercive power of government to force believers nationwide all the way to the church door to change their belief system,” he said.

“This is going to escalate if the court goes Roe v. Wade on this in the summer,” he warned. “It won’t diminish it at all. It will take this from a largely provincial state-by-state issue into a national debate that I think’s going to make Roe v. Wade look like a picnic.”