Anti-gay group the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) has called on the GOP to leave empty a seat during President Obama's final State of the Union to represent the millions of Americans who have voted against gay marriage.
Claiming that the Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges “stole” the votes of 50 million Americans, NOM's President Brian Brown said in a statement issued Tuesday, “The Republican leadership ought to set aside an empty chair in the front of the chamber to represent the more than fifty million Americans whose votes in support of traditional marriage were stolen by the US Supreme Court. It's a national insult that President Obama would celebrate such an affront to democracy.”
NOM makes no mention of the national insult of having a law-touting, highly-paid public official invited to the President's final state of the union address.
As for the 50 million people NOM refers to in its bombastic press release, these are individuals in 31 states who during various election cycles voted against marriage equality. NOM says that by defending the rights of a minority from the discriminatory rule of the majority, the Supreme Court has “obliterated those votes.”
RELATED – Megyn Kelly Not Amused by Brian Brown's Idiocy on SCOTUS: WATCH
The call from NOM came in response to President Obama's inviting SCOTUS plaintiff Jim Obergefell to attend the State of the Union with First Lady Michelle Obama, a move NOM “sharply condemned.”
Brown added, “It's an outrage that President Obama is honoring the extermination of true marriage in our nation's laws as a result of an anti-constitutional, illegitimate ruling of the US Supreme Court. President Obama is trying to honor something that is completely dishonorable because it strips from the law the truth of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and substitutes a fiction from the left that marriage can be anything you want it to be.”
Brown also made sure to sound the dog whistle of religious liberty:
“If the President wanted to do justice concerning this ruling, he would have invited all the people of faith who have been victimized by it — bakers, florists, photographers, nonprofit groups, etc. — and apologized to them and the American people for the supreme lie that is same-sex ‘marriage.' The Obergefell ruling has exposed the falsehood that there would never be consequences for redefining marriage, our most fundamental and important social institution.”
[h/t Right Wing Watch]
