Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), has predicted that the Supreme Court won't “constitutionalize” gay marriage when it takes up the issue.

Brown based his prediction on the one federal ruling out that has upheld a state's right to define marriage as a heterosexual union and thereby exclude gay and lesbian couples from the institution.

“If the court rules next year that the U.S. Constitution permits states to define marriage in the traditional way, as I believe they will, we'll again hear shocked reaction from the left,” Brown wrote in a U.S. News and World Report op-ed, referring to passage in 2008 of Proposition 8, California's now ended marriage ban. “But there will have been many signs that the Supreme Court was not going to 'constitutionalize' gay marriage, most notably the decision handed down recently by a federal court in Louisiana.”

“Oh, you didn’t hear much about the Louisiana decision? No surprise. Here's what happened. U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman, following extensive briefing and argument, ruled that the U.S. Constitution does not prohibit the state of Louisiana from defining marriage solely as one man and one woman, nor refusing to recognize so-called same-sex marriages performed elsewhere.”

Feldman's ruling, however, almost exclusively relied on dissenting opinions, not majority rulings.

(Related: Federal judge upholds Louisiana's gay marriage ban; says it's “anchored to democratic process.”)

“We're probably 10 months away from the Supreme Court issuing a definitive ruling on whether defining marriage in state law solely as the union of one man and one woman violates the Constitution. When that ruling comes, many people will once again be shocked that the 'inevitable' didn't happen because they hadn't heard much about Feldman and his prescient ruling in Louisiana,” Brown added.