Brian Brown, the president of the
National Organization for Marriage (NOM), claims in a blog post that
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has “abandoned the
fight to preserve marriage as the union of one man and one woman.”
The nation's largest group dedicated to
undermining the Supreme Court's finding that gay and lesbian couples
have a constitutional right to marry endorsed Senator Ted Cruz's
presidential ambitions late last year.
(Related: Brian
Brown: NOM endorsement helped Ted Cruz surge.)
On Thursday, just four days before
Iowans kick off the process of picking the next president of the
United States, Brown claimed that Trump is merely pandering on the
issue and crowned Cruz “a champion for marriage.”
“The controvertible record
demonstrates that Ted Cruz will be a champion for marriage while
Donald Trump has abandoned the fight to preserve marriage as the
union of one man and one woman,” Brown wrote. “It’s just as
simple as that. It’s very easy for skilled politicians to create an
impression on the stump that they are with you and agree with your
values and position on key issues. For example, pretty much every
Republican candidate for president will say that they believe
marriage is the union of one man and one woman.”
“But that is a meaningless statement
given where we are in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s decree
imposing same-sex ‘marriage’ on the nation. Saying is one thing;
doing is another. The real question is what will the various
candidates actually do to fight to restore marriage to our laws and
protect the right of people to continue to act in concert with their
belief that marriage is only one man and one woman?”
“That is why NOM developed our
Presidential Marriage Pledge and fashioned it along the lines of
specific actions a candidate will take if elected president. And in
the ‘doing’ department, Ted Cruz is light years better for us
than is Donald Trump.”
During an appearance earlier this month
on ABC's This Week, Trump called Cruz a “hypocrite” on the
issue: “Just so you know, he's taking money from people who are
very much into the whole gay marriage situation and he's taking money
from them and, you know, raising funds from them … He's a total
hypocrite.”
Trump was referring to comments Cruz
made at a Manhattan fundraiser, where he said that “fighting gay
marriage” would not be a “top-three priority” in his
administration.
(Related: At
Manhattan fundraiser, Ted Cruz says opposition to gay marriage not a
priority.)