Washington – The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) praised the Minnesota Legislature for voting in a bi-partisan fashion to put an amendment on the ballot in 2012 that would preserve marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and committed that it would support the amendment next year.

The following statement can be attributed to Brian Brown, president of NOM:

“We commend the bi-partisan majority in the Minnesota House of Representatives that voted Saturday night to put an amendment on the ballot preserving marriage as the union of a man and a woman. The House joins a bi-partisan majority in the state Senate, and the amendment will now go before voters in November 2012. NOM looks forward to supporting the campaign and lending our expertise and resources to those of allies in the state. We will have a thorough, respectful, discussion with the voters of Minnesota on all the reasons why the definition of marriage should be preserved as the union of a man and a woman, and to explain the risks to Minnesotans if they allow an activist judge or liberal legislators to redefine marriage in the future without public approval.

“The vote Saturday night represents another in a string of stinging defeats for the gay-marriage group Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and their state allies, and is further concrete evidence that the widely-reported claim that same-sex marriage is inevitable is a lie. No state in this nation has embraced same-sex marriage since 2009, and many have explicitly rejected it. In 2009, New York, New Jersey and Maine turned down gay marriage, and in 2010 voters in Iowa threw three judges off their Supreme Court who had imposed same-sex marriage. Earlier this year, Maryland and Rhode Island – two deep blue states who were said by the HRC to be likely to adopt gay marriage this year – explicitly rejected it. Now Minnesota, another liberal state, is on the path to enact a marriage amendment. We hope that the media will start to pay attention at what the American people are doing through their actions – they are rejecting same-sex marriage in droves.

“We are confident that voters in Minnesota will vote to adopt the marriage amendment preserving traditional marriage against judicial and legislative activism, just as voters in 30 other states have done. We look forward to being part of the campaign.”