The courts are the primary obstacle to preserving traditional marriage, National Organization for Marriage president told The Daily Caller Wednesday.
“There have been 37 states that have voted to protect marriage as the union between a man and a woman. We’ve only lost three states, which have affirmed the redefinition of marriage,” Brown explained in an interview. “That is a pretty good track record.”
According to Brown, while the media, pop culture and “elites” have been pushed Americans — specifically Republicans — to abandon the marriage issue, most Americans are in favor of protecting traditional marriage.
As the pressure embrace same-sex marriage has increased, Brown contends that it is the courts that have been the least friendly to his organization’s cause.
“People say, ‘wWell, you lost New Jersey’ — the courts forced gay marriage on New Jersey,” Brown said of the October gay marriage decision in New Jersey.
“The only way to stop something like that — and what we are working towards — is you’ve got to have nominated judges who will interpret and not make up the law,” Brown. “There [is] a whole group of people, not just ‘social conservatives’ that believe this, and I think increasingly, people are recognizing that if the courts can do this on social issues, they can do it on anything.”
“The other side is using the courts — there are now 50 lawsuits throughout the country,” he said explaining that gay marriage activists are looking to have the Supreme Court ultimately redefine marriage.
“That’s the whole end game for them. It is not democratic,” Brown said.
Brown said that he is confident a national referendum on same-sex marriage would reveal that most Americans still favor the traditional definition of marriage.
Right now, however, Brown said his side’s best strategy is to continue to push for a federal marriage amendment.
Shortly after the Supreme Court struck down a portion of the Defense of Marriage Act, Kansas Republican Rep. Tim Huelskamp introduced a federal marriage amendment to ban same-sex marriage; Brown said he supports that effort.
“As difficult as the road to amending the U.S. Constitution is, we have to reign in out of control judges, and this is the way to do it,” he said.
And while NOM sees the courts as an obstacle for their movement, the organization recently turned to federal district court in the Eastern District of Virginia seeking damages from the Internal Revenue Service for releasing their confidential 2008 tax returns — which contained private donor information — to the Human Rights Campaign.
On Wednesday, National Review reported that the House Ways and Means Committee has identified an individual who released the information as an employee in the tax exempt organizations unit of the IRS.