Mr. Brown Goes to Washington

I have a strange fascination with the National Organization for Marriage, the anti-gay marriage group of Miss California fame. Perhaps it stems from the fact that until recently, their national headquarters was a mere stone’s throw from my dorm at Princeton University. But now my obsession has moved a bit farther away. NOM’s headquarters has moved out of their 20 Nassau Street, Princeton, NJ digs and is headed to H Street NW, Washington, D.C. My friends and I will no longer be able to organize dance-party protests outside their national headquarters without taking a bus or a train down to Washington. Spearheading the move to Washington, D.C. is Brian Brown, NOM’s executive director that was profiled in the Washington Post on Friday. From H Street, Brown will be managing anti-marriage equality campaigns in Iowa, Maine, California, and New Jersey, among other states. The move means NOM is serious. They’re no longer a kooky pop-culture phenomenon, with a campy "Gathering Storm" ad or a 2M4M campaign.

What is most disappointing—and disturbing—about the Post’s profile of Brown is the degree to which the writer, Monica Hesse, fell hook, line, and sinker for NOM’s marketing in its entirety. Hesse positively fawns over Brown, saying that in contrast to "the people who specialize in whipping crowds into frothy frenzies, who say things like ‘Katrina was caused by the gays,’" Brown speaks to a "country [that] is not made up of people in the far wings, right or left, [but] is made up of a movable middle, reasonable people looking for reasonable arguments to assure them that their feelings have a rational basis." Hesse seems to have missed that fighting against same-sex marriage becomes a more and more unreasonable position as the public warms to it. The idea that Brown’s cause is rational is just a tactic: it’s exactly what he and other social conservatives want the public to think.

Brown is a husband and father, though his wife seems somewhat ashamed of what her husband does and initially had a hard time understanding what the "big deal" was with same-sex couples getting married. Brown has apparently has devoted his life not to his family but to his cause of stopping the gays from getting married. Hesse mistakes Brown’s single-minded obsession for a reasonable, fair-minded, logical, and rational argument seemingly because he has a degree from Oxford and started a history Ph.D. at UCLA. Hesse’s perspective is that obviously his education protects him from accusations of bigotry. "He takes nothing personally. He means nothing personal. He is never accusatory or belittling. His arguments are based on his understandings of history, not on messages from God that gays caused Hurricane Katrina," Hesse writes.

Brown believes that because Western civilization has historically not recognized same-sex marriages, they shouldn’t have a place in our modern legal system. (As Stephanie Coontz writes, what’s actually most common in Western civilization’s history of marriage is polygyny, not monogamous heterosexual marriages.) The comparison means little when you factor in differences among regions, time periods, and cultures. But Hesse rolls with this flawed understanding of the glorified tax status that is marriage in the 21st-century United States, developing in its modern form fairly recently.

The Post’s profile does not hide the fact that Brown is a devout Catholic (like many of the crusading conservatives, he converted as a young man while studying at Oxford). In doing so, it gives away the tried-and-true tactic Brown is using—placing a dummy wall between his Catholicism and his "family values," which he tries to defend on other-than-religious grounds. The modern social conservative movement uses supposed "logic" and "reason" to advance arguments which have traditionally been presented on religious grounds. Princeton Professor Robert George, chair of NOM’s board of directors, does the same thing with his arguments, using his distinguished academic pedigree and his debate skills to distance his social conservatism from his ardent Catholic faith.

Indeed, NOM’s messaging itself speaks to the extent to which this is just a tactic: the emails the organization sends to its supporters use religious language that doesn’t make it onto the public face of NationForMarriage.org. Brown, for example, sometimes signs his emails "Yours in Christ," despite the secular language used on the website. All this "reason" and "logic" is just a ruse, one as transparently false as the notion that NOM is a grassroots organization.

The Post is not always the best at calling out idiocy that appears in its pages (see, most recently, certain op-eds by conservative leaders), and so it’s worth emphasizing that opposition to marriage equality is an inherently ridiculous premise. “‘People mature,’ he says. Their views change,” Hesse writes. But data indicate a steady increase in support for marriage equality; the mainstream position is becoming one of approval of same-sex marriage.

In terms of pure and simple logic, it’s patently absurd to declare that what "marriage" means in 21st-century America should be decided based upon what that word connoted in Victorian Britain, Reformation-era Germany, ancient Rome, or Biblical-era Canaan. Cultural attitudes are not static, and the fact that Brown and NOM couch their misapplication of the historical narrative and their prejudicial activism in less hellfire-and-damnation-esque tones does not make what they’re trying to do less insidious or problematic.

The Post ends its profile by telling us that NOM’s executive director is "off to quietly crusade for the hearts and minds of people who, like Brown, pride themselves on being rational, mainstream, and sane." It strikes me as far more "rational, mainstream, and sane" to advocate for the equality of all Americans in our legal system, whatever the gender of the people whom they love. And if I have to leave the comfort of small-town New Jersey and schlep down to Washington, D.C. to do it, so be it.

Emily is a staff writer for Campus Progress. She attends Princeton University.

Related Stories

• How ‘The Lorax’ Highlights the Role of Youth in the Climate Movement
• Student: Congress, Don’t Let My Loan Rates Double
• For Young Black Men, ‘Trayvon Martin Was You’
• How the Affordable Care Act Saved My Ability to Walk
• What Does Justice for Tyler Clementi Look Like?