Brian Brown, president of the National
Organization for Marriage (NOM), has vowed to “roll back gay
marriage” wherever it exits.
Brown made his comments in an interview
with The
New York Times, adding that “Ultimately, as Lincoln said,
we can't have a country half slave and half free.”
NOM, a large contributor to passage of
Proposition 8, which for nearly five years trumped a California
Supreme Court decision legalizing such unions in the state, hasn't
been much on the winning side in recent months, losing 10 battles
since November.
(Related: NOM's
Brian Brown condemns Supreme Court rulings on gay marriage.)
In an appearance Sunday on This
Week, Brown called the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision
to lift its hold on a lower court's ruling invalidating Proposition 8
part of a pattern of “lawlessness.”
(Related: Supreme
Court denies Prop 8 supporters' request to halt marriages in
California.)
“The rule of law is harmed and all
those millions of voters in the state of California who stood up and
said, 'We know the truth about marriage. We know that marriage is
the union of a man and a woman.' They are harmed when the courts are
used to say they don't have a right to be represented. And that's
what the court did. … Is it an American value to deprive those
people in California who stood up and voted to protect marriage as
the union of a man and a woman from their right to be heard?”
“The court … did not create a
right out of thin air to redefine marriage throughout this country.
What it did do is rob the proponents of Proposition 8 after they had
seen utter lawlessness with Governor Brown and the attorney general
refusing to defend the law.” (The video is embedded on this page.
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On the show's roundtable, Delaware
Representative Donna Edwards, a Democrat, disagreed, suggesting that
the rulings created a foundation for the court to later affirm gay
couples' right to marriage.
“I think it's almost three strikes
and you're out: DOMA, Prop 8 and the next to go are the state bans,”
Edwards said.