David Blankenhorn, a top witness for the supporters of Prop 8, today announced that he now supports same-sex marriage “for the good that it can do.” In a New York Times op-ed, “How My View on Gay Marriage Changed,” Blankenhorn laments the continuing decline of the institution of marriage, but adds that “if fighting gay marriage was going to help marriage overall, I think we’d have seen some signs of it by now.”
Blankenhorn, who is founder and president of the Institute for American Values, writes about “comity,” “respect for an emerging consensus,” and the primary importance of “the equal dignity of homosexual love,” and states that “legally recognizing gay and lesbian couples and their children is a victory for basic fairness,” while adding, “I don’t believe that opposite-sex and same-sex relationships are the same.”
Writing, “the time has come for me , [sic] to accept gay marriage and emphasize the good that it can do,” Blankenhorn doubles-down on his his support for the institution of marriage as “a gift that society bestows on its children.” In Blankenhorn’s mind — and in the mind of the religious right — from the dawn of time, the primary reason for marriage, created by God, first and foremost, is to protect children, not to protect or enhance the lives of husbands and wives. He insists, “I am not recanting any of it.”
I opposed gay marriage believing that children have the right, insofar as society makes it possible, to know and to be cared for by the two parents who brought them into this world. I didn’t just dream up this notion: the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which came into force in 1990, guarantees children this right.
Marriage is how society recognizes and protects this right. Marriage is the planet’s only institution whose core purpose is to unite the biological, social and legal components of parenthood into one lasting bond. Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you. In this sense, marriage is a gift that society bestows on its children.
At the level of first principles, gay marriage effaces that gift. No same-sex couple, married or not, can ever under any circumstances combine biological, social and legal parenthood into one bond. For this and other reasons, gay marriage has become a significant contributor to marriage’s continuing deinstitutionalization, by which I mean marriage’s steady transformation in both law and custom from a structured institution with clear public purposes to the state’s licensing of private relationships that are privately defined.
Blankenhorn concludes:
So my intention is to try something new. Instead of fighting gay marriage, I’d like to help build new coalitions bringing together gays who want to strengthen marriage with straight people who want to do the same. For example, once we accept gay marriage, might we also agree that getting married before having children is a vital cultural value that all of us should do more to embrace? Can we agree that, for all lovers who want their love to last, marriage is preferable to cohabitation? Can we discuss whether both gays and straight people should think twice before denying children born through artificial reproductive technology the right to know and be known by their biological parents?
Will this strategy work? I don’t know. But I hope to find out.
He would do well to ask his friends on the anti-gay right, like Robert P. George, Maggie Gallagher, and Bryan Fischer, for starters.
Blankenhorn was been touted by the right as an “expert witness” against the right of same-sex couples to marry. Upon cross examination in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger Prop 8 trial, he actually was forced to admit, “I believe that adopting same-sex marriage would be likely to improve the well-being of gay and lesbian households and their children.” In his decision, Prop 8 judge Vaughn Walker ruled Blankenhorn to be not an “expert witness,” and called his anti-gay marriage testimony “unreliable.” NOM co-founder Maggie Gallagher has regularly pointed to Blankenhorn as a reliable source in her fight against same-sex marriage.
Blankenhorn, author of several books on “traditional” marriage and fatherhood has also lectured against same-sex marriage, and yet is perhaps best known for a comment he was forced to concede during the Prop 8 trial. Let’s close on that remark:
“We would be more American on the day we permit same-sex marriage than the day before.â€
 Hat-tip: Good As You