…Rich would’ve been better served searching the archives of his own paper before teeing off on Blankenhorn, a magna cum laude Harvard grad, Vista volunteer and center-left community organizer. In 1998, no less a source than the New York Times published a glowing profile of Blankenhorn, describing him as a “consensus builder for a moral base in society.” [:]
[Blankenhorn's] quest for the moral basis of society came after graduating from Harvard and working several years as a community volunteer in the Boston area, railing against high utility rates and organizing low-income residents to fight City Hall. After seeing firsthand the effect of single-mother families on children, he began writing articles on the importance of traditional fatherhood, and spent three years fruitlessly knocking on doors, trying to get centrist and liberal academics interested in families. Finally, in 1989, he put together the first of several conferences on the subject, beginning to popularize a notion of a more civil society that was not necessarily based on divine revelation.
Had Rich bothered to ask anyone who works in social policy, he would’ve learned that Blankenhorn is a southern-born acolyte of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, not some fire-breathing right-winger. An Obama supporter unafraid to make this case to an evangelical audience, Blankenhorn has been at the leading edge of the fatherhood movement, promoting the efforts to reduce the number of broken homes (particularly in the inner city) as a positive aim of public policy and as a social good. What’s more, as a supporter of a compromise solution on same sex marriage with Jonathan Rauch, Blankenhorn has been more than willing to take stands that put him at odds with both the right and the left….
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