Previous scholarship has well documented the infrastructure of the LGBT movement for same-sex marriage as relatively thin and "weak," dominated by a few centralized, professionally managed social movement organizations at the national level that are asymmetrically linked to peripheral state and local organizations that in turn are largely factionalized and disconnected from each other. Conversely, the infrastructure of the Religious Right anti-gay marriage countermovement is described as relatively thick, strong and cohesive, headed by corporate style, multi-issue social movement organizations that form internally-dense centers of leadership with bridging ties to blocks of grassroots and constituent groups across multiple regions. Combined, these yield a set of propositions about (1) the multi-institutional fields in which the respective movements are embedded; (2) the structural shape and characteristics of the respective movement infrastructures; and (3) the organization of leadership across the two movements.

I employ a set of network-theoretic approaches to assess whether these claims hold under empirical evaluation. I find aspects of centralized and decentralized structures to characterize both movements, but in generally opposite patterns. The strong leadership of the LGBT movement is largely centralized, but peripheral weak ties counter this tendency by integrating the broader network. The strong leadership of the Religious Right countermovement is largely reticulate, but weak ties counter this tendency by influencing the network toward a high degree of centralization. I advance the concept of network identity to characterize the unique configuration of organization, movement and solidary collective identities (Gamson 1991; Rupp and Taylor 1999) that are structured by densely linked sub-networks of strong movement leaders.