Anti-equality activist Brian Brown bragged on Tuesday about hanging out in Washington, D.C., with high-ranking Catholic Church official Gerhard Müller. Brown told his supporters that a highlight of their meetings was “the opportunity to spend time with Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh.”
Brown’s photo with the two justices is striking given that he is actively working to get the Supreme Court to overturn its 2015 Obergefell decision, which recognized that same-sex couples have the right to get married, as well as Roe v. Wade, which recognized a woman’s right to have an abortion.
Brown has made a career of fighting to make life more difficult and dangerous for LGBTQ people around the world by resisting and seeking to reverse advances in cultural acceptance and legal equality.
Earlier this year, Brown denounced presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg’s marriage as illegitimate and vowed to get marriage equality back before the Supreme Court so that its right-wing judges, fortified with Trump nominees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, can reverse the marriage equality ruling.
Appropriately for a Trump supporter, Brown doesn’t let honesty get in the way of a good scare tactic; a few months ago, he charged that the Equality Act then pending in Congress would “make showing support for marriage as solely the union of one man and one woman to be illegal.” That’s simply not true.
The Equality Act would add to existing federal civil rights law protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. If the bill were to become law and survive scrutiny by right-wing justices, Brown would still have every right to attack same-sex couples’ marriages and seek to strip their families of legal protections.
