Brian Brown, president of the National
Organization for Marriage (NOM), has predicted that the Supreme Court
won't “constitutionalize” gay marriage when it takes up the
issue.
Brown based his prediction on the one
federal ruling out that has upheld a state's right to define marriage
as a heterosexual union and thereby exclude gay and lesbian couples
from the institution.
“If the court rules next year that
the U.S. Constitution permits states to define marriage in the
traditional way, as I believe they will, we'll again hear shocked
reaction from the left,” Brown wrote in a U.S.
News and World Report op-ed, referring to passage in 2008 of
Proposition 8, California's now ended marriage ban. “But there
will have been many signs that the Supreme Court was not going to
'constitutionalize' gay marriage, most notably the decision handed
down recently by a federal court in Louisiana.”
“Oh, you didn’t hear much about the
Louisiana decision? No surprise. Here's what happened. U.S.
District Court Judge Martin Feldman, following extensive briefing and
argument, ruled that the U.S. Constitution does not prohibit the
state of Louisiana from defining marriage solely as one man and one
woman, nor refusing to recognize so-called same-sex marriages
performed elsewhere.”
Feldman's ruling, however, almost
exclusively relied on dissenting opinions, not majority rulings.
(Related: Federal
judge upholds Louisiana's gay marriage ban; says it's “anchored to
democratic process.”)
“We're probably 10 months away from
the Supreme Court issuing a definitive ruling on whether defining
marriage in state law solely as the union of one man and one woman
violates the Constitution. When that ruling comes, many people will
once again be shocked that the 'inevitable' didn't happen because
they hadn't heard much about Feldman and his prescient ruling in
Louisiana,” Brown added.