Brian Brown, the president of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), has suggested that gay marriage will “normalize pedophilia.”

NOM, the nation's most vociferous opponent of gay marriage, has insisted it is only concerned with preserving marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and harbors no animus towards gay men and lesbians.

But in a blog post titled NOM Marriage News, Brown asks whether the normalization of pedophilia will be a consequence of marriage equality.

“When you knock over a core pillar of society like marriage, and then try to redefine Biblical views of marriage as bigotry, there will be consequences. Will one of the consequences be a serious push to normalize pedophilia?”

“The Daily Caller raised the question by pointing us all to a high-level academic conference in Baltimore this week, Pedophilia: Minor-Attracted Persons and the DSM: Issues and Controversies.”

“The DSM is the diagnostic manual that defines mental illness. You probably recall that a key moment in the gay rights campaign was the 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association, the organization that produces the DSM, to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses.”

“Enquiring people want to know: Will pedophiles become 'minor-attracted persons' in our culture? Will courts which endorse orientation as a protected class decide down the road that therefore laws which discriminate against 'minor-attracted persons' must be narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest?”

“Here's the fundamental truth: Ideas have consequences and so do words – because they contain ideas, because they are the vehicle through which and by which human beings describe reality.”

The August 17 symposium referred to by Brown featured guest speaker Fred Berlin, M.D., Ph.D., founder of the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma.

Writing at the Equality Matters blog, Carlos Maza noted that the symposium had nothing to do with marriage.

“What NOM is actually doing is attempting to compare homosexuality to pedophilia, as evidence by the fact that Brown chose to reference the APA's decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses.”

(Related: Does NOM support the criminalization of gay sex?)