Former opponent David Blankenhorn: why fighting equality is wrong

David Blankenhorn was one of the two "expert witnesses" who testified in favor of Prop8. He subsequently reversed his view and came out against it. From an Op/Ed in the LA Times: 

A very few years ago, most Americans (including me) viewed the idea of gay marriage as both undesirable and wildly improbable. Today, most Americans (including me) believe that permitting gay and lesbian couples to marry is the right thing to do, a matter of simple justice. ...

It may sound trite, but for me the key was the gradual breakthrough of empathy. I found that as friendships develop, empathy becomes at least possible, no longer kept at bay by a wall of fixed belief. Put simply, becoming friends with gay people who were married or wanted to get married led me to realize that I couldn't in good conscience continue to oppose it.

But another reality was also becoming clear. At the same time that gay and lesbian couples and their supporters are struggling for the right to marry, millions of straight couples are abandoning marriage entirely, with tragic consequences for them and their children. Further, this abandonment is occurring among our once heavily married middle and working class.
...
This class-based marriage divide is not only large, it's constantly getting larger. Scholarship shows that it's contributing significantly to the rise of economic inequality. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that it's threatening the American dream.

....: The goal of marriage equality is to make marriage available and achievable for all who seek it — gay and straight, the upscale minority and the non-upscale majority. And the strategy for achieving full marriage equality is a strategy of strange bedfellows: social conservatives and gay rights liberals, a coalition that could put an end forever to the conflict between gay rights and family values.

That coalition is waiting to be born, no matter what the Supreme Court decides.

 

The real threat to marriage

We 've talked before about David Blankenhorn, former Prop 8 supporter and witness, who has now changed his mind and come out for equality.  Part of his change of heart, he says, was driven by the awful rhetoric of the other anti-equality people who continue to degenerate into vile anti-gay slurs.

Of course, he's now an apostate to them, and funding for his organization (a pro-marriage group) has fallen precipitously, because he now is pro-marriage for everyone.  And he recognizes the real threat to marriage stability has nothing to do with gay couples.

Is there common ground between Blankenhorn and liberals?  Jonathan Rauch says yes, in a conversation with Blankenhorn that identifies the real danger to marriage:  rising inequality.  Marriage is massively falling off in the lower-middle  and working-class groups.

Family instability among the less-educated and rising inequality are two sides of the same coin, each perniciously feeding the other. Yes, it's tough to do anything about. But yes, I have hope, because we've arrived at a moment when, as a society, we can finally take off the culture-war blinders and see the real problem, which is the sine qua non for doing anything about it. 

For many years, liberals were loath to talk about marriage and family values because both were code for "beat up on homosexuals." At the same time, conservatives were loath to talk about inequality and class because both were code for "beat up on free markets." But the era of gay marriage raises the prospect of a pro-marriage agenda which liberals can embrace as not even slightly anti-gay. And the country's rapid division into marital and educational haves and have-nots makes inequality a problem that family-values conservatives can't ignore. 

So the left is getting interested in family values and the right is getting interested in inequality, and that's not because they want to but because they have to. You can't address either without also addressing the other. Gay marriage is simply not where the action is if you care about inequality and kids. 

I've never seen an opening like this. That's why I'm hopeful. That's why I want your think tank to survive the efforts by culture-war conservatives to defund it. (Everyone: go here to learn more, and please consider adding your support.) That's why I'm on your board. Lots of folks will continue the old conversation, but we can start the new one.

Another form of marriage activism

As you may recall, David Blankenhorn was one of the two (count ‘em) pro-Prop8 witnesses that testified in the Prop 8 federal case two years ago. (Yes, children, it’s been a long road to get it to the Supreme Court….and LGBT people still can’t marry in California. But I digress.)

 Last summer, Blankenhorn changed his mind about marriage equality, because he had become dismayed at the bile and bigotry expressed by that side. So, he made a plea for marriage.

 The New York Times tells us that Blankenhorn is now working on a pro-marriage coalition that is more interested in the institution than the gender of the participants.

On Thursday, Mr. Blankenhorn’s research group, the Institute for American Values in New York, plans to issue “A Call for a New Conversation on Marriage,” a tract renouncing the culture war that he was once part of, in favor of a different pro-marriage agenda.  

The proposed conversation will try to bring together gay men and lesbians who want to strengthen marriage with heterosexuals who want to do the same. 

 .... “New Conversation” is the capstone of a six-month period of rebuilding and rebranding for Mr. Blankenhorn. After his Op-Ed article appeared, five of his institute’s board members… resigned almost immediately. The institute lost about half a million dollars in donations…. “We’re in a real steep hole,” [BLankenhorn said]. “I laid two people off and am losing one by attrition.” ... 

The “new conversation” may discomfit many conservatives by including gay men and lesbians. And this conversation may not suit many liberals who are wary of stigmatizing unwed parents or treating marriage as some sort of desirable norm. …  

The debate, [William Galston, from the Brookings Institute] said, should not be about gay versus straight but about why so few poor people are choosing the benefits of marriage.

[Journalist Jonathan] Rauch, who has long been criticized by fellow gay writers for being too conservative, said that it is time to raise different questions: “What does, so to speak, the sexual-orientation-blind, pro-family agenda look like?” he asked. “The family values agenda for the postgay world?” 

Uber anti-gay activist Maggie Gallagher is making snide remarks.

Ms. Gallagher cautioned... that there may be more conservatives willing to accept gay allies than liberals willing to publicly support marriage.

Because of course she wants to paint liberals as anti-marriage. She wants to paint us as destroying marriage.  Well, I'm sorry Maggie, but my wife and I are about as boringly pro-marriage as you can get.


 And, already there's some pushback, in an article entitled "Does Championing Marriage Exclude Single Parents?"

A focus on marriage (and wealth) can put the onus for supporting a family squarely back on the parents, even when there are some things — like paid sick leave, preventive health care, maternity and paternity leaves, affordable birth control and day care — that “takes a village” to provide, except for the wealthiest among us. Any new conversation sounds promising, particularly when it’s offered up as part of what appears to be a centrist coalition in extremely divisive political times. But what we need most is to find a way to talk about strengthening families without excluding families. Strengthening marriages may be one way to create a better structure for raising children — but marriage is far from the only structure we need.

You know, I think it's possible to support the ideal of marriage as a liberal, without denigrating single parents.  Or gay ones.  Let's work on supporting families, eh? And it takes all of us.  maybe start with family leave---- and sick leave---- what else supports healthy families?

David Blankenhorn changes his mind

During the Prop8 trial, one of the two (count 'em) Pro Prop8 witnesses was a man named David Blankenhorn, who exasperated the judge and actually admitted that marriage equality was probably good for the children of gay couples. yes, he was on THEIR side.

Well, Blankenhorn actually has come out in favor of equality. Knock me over with a feather boa. From the NY Times:

Mr. Blankenhorn, who was raised in the South and attended Harvard, had long stood out among opponents of same-sex marriage because he did not invoke a biblical or religious justification and did not oppose civil unions for gay men and lesbians. Instead, he argued that marriage was society’s most important institution and had in recent decades come under attack, and that same-sex marriage was only adding to its decline.

He said that he had long hoped the debate over same-sex marriage would center on parenthood, not private relationships, but that in the public’s mind today the issue was simply about equality for gay men and lesbians — in other words, civil rights.

“And to my deep regret,” he wrote, “much of the opposition to gay marriage seems to stem, at least in part, from an underlying antigay animus. To me, a Southerner by birth whose formative moral experience was the civil rights movement, this fact is profoundly disturbing.”

So, he too has been put off by the anti-gay ferocity, and feels that the anti-equality side has hurt itself with that. Blankenhorn writes,

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 marrying 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?

Yes, I can go there, at least part of the way. Many of us in the LGBT community who want marriage want it precisely for the same reasons that BLankenhorn values it, in terms of stability and family (even if we may disagree on his extremism). Many of us are as concerned about the sexualization of society as Blankenhorn is.  Maybe this will be a way to start that conversation and find a productive way to move ahead.

Prop 8 supporter opposes NC Amendment One

This is big news. David Blankenhorn was one of the two witnesses to testify in favor of Prop8 in the 9th district federal case. Even he finds the amendment in North Carolina to be over the top, as he comes out against it in this new Op/Ed.

For one thing, it means that North Carolina could not, now or ever, take any step or devise any policy to extend legal recognition and protection to same-sex couples. No domestic partnership laws. No civil unions. Nothing.

That’s mighty cold. If you disdain gay and lesbian persons, and don’t care whether they and their families remain permanently outside of the protection of our laws, such a policy might be your cup of tea. But it’s not our view, and we doubt that it’s the view of most North Carolinians.

Indeed, it's just bad politics. My emphasis....

If you want to create a backlash against mother-father marriage – if you want to convince people that the real agenda of marriage advocates is not protecting marriage, but ignoring and ostracizing gay people – then this amendment might be to your liking. But we believe that the cause of marriage is hurt, not helped, by gratuitously linking it to the cause of never under any circumstances helping gay and lesbian couples.

A voice of reason? or purely pragmatic?

If you wonder why the push for gay marriage is so rapidly gaining ground across our nation, especially among young people, we don’t think you need to look much further than this tragic social dynamic, in which support for mother-father marriage appears to many to have merged with either overt antagonism or cold indifference regarding the actual lives and needs of gay and lesbian couples and their children.

From now on, when we stand up for marriage, let’s make sure that it’s marriage that we’re standing up for. In 2012, perhaps we marriage advocates can begin to prove – perhaps you in North Carolina can be national leaders in proving – that supporting marriage need not carry with it the requirement of bigotry against gay and lesbian persons.

Meanwhile, NOM and their supporters continue to prove the opposite, calling faithful lesbian and gay couples pedophiles, and worse, as they cynically try to fan racial conflicts and provoke violence. The reason so many of these groups are called hate groups is NOT because they disagree about marriage equality. It's because they distort the facts and tell blatant, demonizing lies about LGBT people.

In North Carolina, people will have the option to vote "NO" on hatred and divisiveness. Same sex marriage is already illegal in NC. There is no need for this amendment, except for a bare desire to hurt an unpopular group.

Support from unexpected places

From the WSJ, via Prop8trialtracker:

The most-recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll suggests that views on gay marriage are shifting faster than for any other hot-button social issue in recent memory, pollsters say..... The poll showed the biggest jump among blue-collar voters and African Americans, two key Democratic constituencies. Support among blue-collar voters jumped 20 percentage points to 49%. African-American support for gay marriage rose from 32% to 50%. More than half of Hispanics and voters aged 18 to 34 also voiced support.

Wow! That's quite impressive. The 'tracker goes on to say,

If these trends hold up, this could be big news for the marriage movement, not just in terms of the President’s position but also the greater political landscape itself. .... More importantly, it means that the political majority that favors marriage is not only growing, but becoming more diverse.

It's becoming more American. It's just what Prop8 supporter David Blankenhorn said as he testified against us in the Prop8 trial:

“We would be more American on the day we permit same-sex marriage than the day before.” (source PDF)

Grounds for Appeal?

Remember how the SCOTUS decided not to allow delayed broadcast of the Prop8 trial? This came after the judge had agreed that even if it WERE broadcast, any witness could request the cameras be turned off.

No matter, a number of the Defense witnesses pulled out, even though there was no broadcast allowed.

Now Maggie Gallagher claims that the trial was biased because their witnesses pulled out and it's all that mean judge's fault.

Is this their ground for appeal? That even though there were no broadcasts, the mere fact that broadcasts were possible, EVEN THOUGH anyone could avoid being broadcast, is enough to tilt the field?

Well, if the missing witnesses were anything like as good as the ones that DID testify for the defense, I'm sorry they didn't show. The defense witnesses they had were excellent....for the plaintiffs.

As reported in the Sacramento Bee,

Under cross-examination, Blankenhorn said he has not scientifically studied the impact of same-sex marriage on the institution of marriage in countries where it is now legal.

And he said that none of the work by scholars that he submitted to court has studied the impact either.

He also said he knew of no study showing that children raised by gay parents are worse off than children raised by their biological mothers and fathers.

During his wide-ranging testimony, Blankenhorn also said, "I believe homophobia is a real presence in our society" that "I deplore and wish would go away."

He said he now views domestic partnership as "part of a humane compromise" to the clash over gay marriage, although he admitted he had concerns that it might be discriminatory to confine gays to that type of legal union.

"It is discriminatory to call two things that are the same different names," Blankenhorn said. But he said he feels "satisfied" that domestic partnership is a good compromise.

Pretty good...for our side.

Prop8 on trial: the defense rests

The final witness for the Prop8 defenders was David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values. Compared to the discussion with the academics (even the ill-prepared Dr Miller), who attempted to review scholarly studies and opinions, Blankenhorn made sweeping statements that essentially say, "I believe it, that ends it". He is not an academic, and has no academic credentials in this area. His thesis is that the "deinstitutionalization" of marriage, which has occurred as it focuses more on adult desires, is bad for children: marriage's proper purpose is for licit sex and procreation. And, since gays can't procreate, same sex marriage is therefore going to "deinstitutionalize" straight marriage. (Never mind that straight marriage is doing fine, indeed better than elsewhere, in places like Massachusetts that have marriage equality. Why let data interfere with your argument?)

Now, I have debunked the procreation argument numerous times on my blog; it boils down to (1) there is no requirement for fecundity for straight people to marry (e.g., elderly, infertile, those who don't want kids can all tie the knot), so that can't be the purpose of legal marriage, and (2) GLBT families have kids, either their own from previous relationships, various assisted methods, or adopted, and without marriage, those kids are disadvantaged. Let's leave that for a minute.

Instead, let's focus on the statements made by this witness in response to the aggressive cross-examination by the expert David Boies. And these statements, remember, are made by a witness for the DEFENSE, who is trying to prove a legitimate state interest in denying marriage to GLBT people. From the AFER transcript, and the brilliant liveblogging at Prop8TrialTracker and FireDogLake:

Blankenhorn: The parenting process in the -- this loadstar notion that animates the marital institution is not the same that is operative in the domestic partnership institution......It is discriminatory and un- -- and morally wrong in my view, morally wrong to refuse to call two things that are the same by the same name.

Blakenhorn: insofar as we are a nation founded on this principle, we would be more American on the day we permitted same-sex marriage than we were on the day before.

Q. Are you aware of any studies showing that children raised from birth by a gay or lesbian couple have worse outcomes than children raised from birth by two biological parents?
Blankenhorn. No, sir.

Blankenhorn: I believe that adopting same-sex marriage would be likely to improve the well-being of gay and lesbian households and their children.

Q: First point you agreed with that ss marriage would improve the happiness of many G&L individuals, couples, and gay community members. Then you agreed that it would extend the benefits of marriage to couples and their children. Then you agreed that a higher proportion of ss couples would enter into committed relationships. Then you agreed that more would enter into long term relationships. Then you agreed that lesbians and (especially) gay men would be less promiscuous. Then you agreed that gay marriage would be a victory for the worthy ideal of tolerance. It would increase the number of those ‘accepted’ and would be a key expansion of the American idea.
Is that right?

Blankenhorn: Yes

Blankenhorn: CU and DP are comparable to marriage, they might blur the distinction [between marriage and marriage-like entities]

Here's one of the more surreal moments, in which Blankenhorn argues that polygamy does not violate the "rule of two"people in a marriage, as long as the marriages are performed sequentially.

Q: I want to pursue whether polygamous marriages are consistent with your so-called rule of two .... IF a man has five wives –
Blankenhorn: No he has five marriages, each is one man one woman


HIs other rules? Must be opposite sex (though he admits in some cultures same sex marrages have occurred) and must always involve sex (which left him a little flummoxed considering incarcerated prisoners who are denied conjugal rights).

The concluding cross:

Q: Marriage is always changing?
blankenhorn: I wrote those words
Q marriage has no single definition?
Blankhorn: I wrote those words too

Remember, this guy is on the side of the defense.

From here, the judge takes a week to review the case, the voluminous documents, videos, and transcripts. Then the attorneys come back for the closing statements.

As Ted Olson, one of our lead attorneys, said,

This is the game that they’re playing. They define marriage as a man and a woman. They call that the institution of marriage. So if you let a man marry a man and a woman marry a woman, it would de-institutionalize marriage. That is the same as saying you are deinstitutionalizing the right to vote when you let women have it. It’s a game. It’s a tautology. They’re saying, ‘this is the definition. You’re going to change the definition by allowing people access that don’t have it now, and that would change it so that people who currently have access won’t want it any more because it’s changed.’ This is all nonsense. They are not proving that. This is a syllogism that falls apart. The major premise, minor premise and conclusion are empty.

And all they have left is bias, ignorance, fear, and occasional hatred. As I've said before: show me one straight marriage harmed by my marriage to my wife. One family harmed by the protections we now also enjoy. One couple whose commitment to each other evaporated because of my vows to my wife.

So here's a deeper reflection. I think that while many Prop8 supporters are ignorant and fearful, the leadership is not. They are playing a longer game for which marriage equality is just one part. Spin aside, can they honestly look at the testimony from their side, the witnesses tied in knots, their awkward attorneys, and the smoking gun of the religious motivations, and truly believe they are right? Or (rather more frightening concept), do they not take it seriously because it doesn't matter, because they know, no matter how wrong they are, how unjust and unfair they are, they have it in the bag already?