National Organization for Marriage President Brian Brown said in a radio interview this week that the fight against marriage equality is the true “civil rights” movement of our time.

Brown, who was promoting this weekend’s March for Marriage on the “Freedom’s Journal” radio program on the American Family Association’s Urban Family Communications network, told host Lonnie Poindexter that like the marches of the civil rights movement, the anti-gay march represents Americans coming together when “great truths have been undermined or attacked.”

“In my view, when you stand up for marriage as the union of a man and a woman, you are standing up for civil rights,” he said. “You’re standing up for the civil rights of children, you’re standing up for the rights of the oppressed, you’re standing up for the one institution that we know has done the best in combatting poverty, in increasing the opportunity for educational attainment. This is the ideal structure in which to raise children and altering it or trying to even more transform it by moving forward with same-sex marriage will be and has been profoundly damaging.”

“And I’m only now talking about what occurs to children, what happens in our schools,” he continued, “and I’m not even touching on the consequences to the church itself and to individuals through undermining religious liberty, which we’ve seen time and time again when same-sex marriage is imposed on states.”

Comparing the March for Marriage to the marches of the civil rights movement, Brown warned that “the freedom of the church to spread the Gospel” is at stake if marriage equality is legalized nationwide.

“The freedom of the church to speak truth to power, the freedom of the church to spread the Gospel, that itself is at stake because you have a growing number of folks even within Congress who think it’s okay to talk about stripping the church of its 501(c)3 status or saying that somehow the church is discriminating when it says this is the truth about marriage,” he said. “That is not discriminating.”

“You know, folks supporting same-sex marriage are trying to hijack the civil rights movement to use it to support the redefinition of marriage,” he added. “That’s not what the civil rights movement was about. In truth, we’re standing for civil rights when we’re standing for the truth of marriage. We’re standing for the rights of churches to proclaim the Gospel.”

Later in the program, Brown told Poindexter that he feels “blessed to have played some role” in the “rainbow coalition” opposing marriage equality. He added that the “rainbow coalition” will stay together even if the Supreme Court issues a sweeping ruling for marriage rights because such a ruling would merely “be putting a lie into the law.”

“The Supreme Court will be putting a lie into the law if they say that somehow all the states need to redefine marriage,” he said. “Marriage is still the union of a man and a woman, we just have a lie embedded in our law. And it will be up to us to continue to grow, continue to work together, and continue to proclaim truth to power if the courts were to put that sort of lie into law.”