In an interview with USA TODAY’s Capital Download, AFER lawyer Ted Olson indicated that with the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the gay marriage cases before it earlier this month, the nation has reached a “point of no return” in the legal battle over gay marriage.

Said Olson:

“I do not believe that the United States Supreme Court could rule that all of those laws prohibiting marriage are suddenly constitutional after all these individuals have gotten married and their rights have changed,” he said in an interview on Capital Download. “To have that snatched away, it seems to me, would be inhuman; it would be cruel; and it would be inconsistent with what the Supreme Court has said about these issues in the cases that it has rendered.”

Olson also pushed back against President Obama’s recent comments praising the court’s incremental approach to LGBT equality that has, as Obama put it, “made the shift less controversial and more lasting.”

“President Obama himself has had an evolution. He started out saying he was opposed to same-sex marriage, then he gradually changed that view. Then he said it should be up to the states and now he says it should be incremental. I think the thing he overlooks…[is] that there are people in 18 states of the United States that don’t have this fundamental right that he has just announced that he believes in and that we believe in – the right to marry the person that you love who happens to be of the same sex. This affects the lives of those individuals and those states, it affects their children that are living in those homes, it affects everyone. Every day that we withhold fundamental constitutional rights from individual citizens in this country, I believe that’s wrong.”

Watch the full interview, AFTER THE JUMP…