For marriage equality opponents, the losing streak continues to grow

Brown envisioned a resistance campaign comparable to that waged by the anti-abortion movement since the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision established a nationwide right to abortion.

“In the next year or so, we’ll either have a massive victory at the Supreme Court, or we’ll need to fight for 10, 20 years to undo the damage that the court has done,” Brown said.

Among the scheduled speakers at the march is Austin Nimocks, senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal group that has fought in court on behalf of laws banning same-sex marriage.

Nimocks argues that America would be better off if the Supreme Court allowed the current split among the states to continue, along with the public debate over the repercussions of same-sex marriage.

“America has not fallen apart because some states have same-sex marriage and others do not,” he said. “We’ve been managing that for 10 years.”

While Nimocks and Brown are optimistic that the Supreme Court won’t impose same-sex marriage, other veterans of the fight against it think differently.

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“Let’s face it: Anybody who does not believe that gay marriage is going to be the law of the land just hasn’t been observing what’s going on,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, a seven-term conservative Republican from Utah, told a radio interviewer last month.

Maggie Gallagher, a former president of the National Organization for Marriage, also expects that outcome. In a recent blog post, she said gay marriage opponents needed to regroup and recognize that they have become “a subculture facing a dominant culture.”

“The way you keep a movement going is to define achievable victories,” she said in an interview. “The marriage movement is in the process of trying to figure out what that is.”