The New York Times published an article today on Brian S. Brown, a 39-year-old father of eight who has raised millions of dollars from religious conservatives – especially his fellow Romans Catholics – to become the nation’s leading opponent of same-sex marriage.
Brown, president of nonprofit National Organization for Marriage, was instrumental in passing Proposition 8, California’s same-sex marriage ban, and is working in a host of states (and, more recently, in France) to defeat gay-friendly candidates and outlaw what he calls “the redefinition of marriage.”
Next Tuesday, Brown will be leading a march before the Supreme Court that he hopes will draw thousands who believe that gay unions hurt children and threaten religious freedom.
“The notion that somehow we are on a one-way elevator to gay marriage, and that no matter what anyone else does that it’s going to happen, is false,” he said in a recent interview, in his office located in Sacramento, with the New York Times. “That is the myth of inevitability.”
Last summer, Brown said in a debate with a gay columnist, “The notion of the uniqueness of men and women is not some side thing in Scripture, it’s key part of our view of humanity: That there are two halves of humanity, male and female, and that we complement each other , and that complementarity bears fruit in children.”
When gay rights advocates began calling same-sex marriage a “civil rights issue,” Brown enlisted black pastors to his cause, a move that shows his resolve to keep the racial analogy from seeping into popular culture.
“When you knock over a core pillar of society like marriage, and then try to redefine biblical views of marriage as bigotry, there will be consequences,” Brown warned last August in a fund-raising letter on his blog. “Will one of the consequences be a serious push to normalize pedophilia?”
Brown played football, ran the Republican Club and was president of student body at Whittier College. He obtained a second degree at Oxford and later went to the University of California, Los Angeles, to pursue a doctorate.
In 2007, Brown, with the help or Robert P. George, a conservative scholar at Princeton, founded the National Organization for Marriage.
If same-sex marriage becomes a cultural norm, Brown says, heterosexual couples will no longer have preference over gay men and lesbians in adoptions, schoolchildren will be taught that same-sex parenting is normal, and those who oppose it will be labeled bigots.
“Children are taught in kindergarten, first grade, that it’s the same thing to grow up and marry a boy as to marry a girl,” he said in a recent interview on C-Span. “That is a profound consequence.”
“No way the court is going to launch another Roe v. Wade,” he said, referring to the 1973 decision that made abortion legal. But whatever the outcome, he said, there will be more battles, either in the courts or in legislatures, and he intends to fight them.
“If we were to lose, would it be difficult?'’ he asked, before quickly answering his own question. “Of course it would be difficult. But we’re never going away.”
