Brian Brown, president of the National
Organization for Marriage (NOM), on Wednesday cheered a Supreme Court
decision granting a stay in a federal appeals court's ruling striking
down Virginia's gay marriage ban as unconstitutional.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals'
order was scheduled to take effect on Thursday morning. It would
have also affected similar bans in West Virginia, North Carolina and
South Carolina.
(Related: Supreme
Court grants stay of Virginia gay marriage ruling.)
Brown applauded the court's decision,
saying it was another sign that the “rush to judgment declaring
marriage to be unconstitutional is not only premature, but
incorrect.”
“We are pleased that the US Supreme
Court has put a halt to the decision in Virginia redefining marriage
in violation of the state's marriage amendment overwhelmingly
approved by voters,” Brown said in a blog post. “We had called
upon the Court to take this step and are gratified that they will now
be able to carefully consider the issues. This is another indication
that the rush to judgment declaring marriage to be unconstitutional
is not only premature, but incorrect. The US Supreme Court has
determined that states have the right to define marriage and we
remain confident that they will uphold all the various traditional
marriage laws and constitutional amendments that have been wrongly
invalidated by federal judges. We look forward to the US Supreme
Court taking one or more of the three marriage cases now pending
before them, and ultimately ruling that defining marriage as the
union of one man and one woman is entirely constitutional.”
Of course, the courts have declared
state bans excluding gay couples from marriage to be invalid, not
marriage as a whole.