Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has been a vocal opponent of marriage equality along with his attorney general, Derek Schmidt, who unsuccessfully represented the state in federal court in 2014.
Then, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned gay marriage bans in June, Brownback issued an executive order in July asserting that both clergy and religious organizations are exempt from recognizing or providing services for same-sex marriages. LGBT rights activists charged that the order promoted the false premise that clergy could be forced to marry gay couples, The Washington Post reported. There was also a concern that the order could even allow hospitals and other religiously affiliated institutions to not recognize the marriages of gay couples.
Now Brownback, a Republican, is predicting that Obergefell v. Hodges, the case behind the Supreme Court's June 26 ruling on same-sex marriage, will go the way of Roe v. Wade, and a decades-long culture war will ensue.
“We’ve been in the life fight for over 45 years since Roe v. Wade,” he said in an interview with me on SiriusXM Progress at the Values Voter Summit last weekend. “I believe life begins at conception and should be protected. I think now, you’re going where, there’s going to be a long battle on the issue of marriage. We’ve seen this play before. The public is now pro-life, after 45 years, because they now look and they say, ‘Life does begin at conception,’ a majority. [On marriage] it is not over. I don’t know what will happen. I just know a number of people look at this as: civilizations for millennia define marriage as a man and woman.”
Brownback's remarks contradict the results of a Gallup poll conducted earlier this year, in which more people described themselves as “pro-choice” than “pro-life” for the first time in eight years.
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