At a panel on gay marriage Saturday,
Cynthia Nixon disagreed with Brian Brown on whether gay couples want
to redefine marriage.
Brown, the president of the National
Organization for Marriage (NOM), the nation's most vociferous
opponent of gay marriage, found himself outnumbered as a panelist on
Saturday's The Case For Gay Marriage at the New Yorker
Festival.
Also participating on the panel were
Jeffrey Ross Toobin, a legal analyst for CNN and The New Yorker,
R. Clarke Cooper, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, a
gay GOP group, lawyer David Boies, who is representing two gay
couples challenging California's gay marriage ban, Proposition 8, and
Bishop Gene Robinson, the Episcopal Church's first openly gay bishop.
Nixon, a vocal supporter of gay
marriage, especially in New York, where
she has campaigned for its legalization, said
opponents of the institution have been forced to feign victimization
as the public increasingly rejects homophobia.
“The only thing they have to say is
'We're the victims here and we're going to be deprived of our right
to define marriage as between a man and a woman,'” Nixon said as
Brown, who was seated to her left, shook his head.
“I want to say – to the gentleman
to my left – that gay people who want to marry have no desire to
redefine marriage in any way. When women got the vote, they did not
redefine voting. When African-Americans got the right to sit at a
lunch counter alongside white people, they did not redefine eating
out,” the Sex and the City 2 star said.