…Another defense witness, David Blankenhorn, the president of the Institute for American Values, a group that studies marriage and families, inexplicably ended up helping the plaintiffs when he said that heterosexual couples have been busy “deinstitutionalizing” the institution of marriage, and that adoptive parents are as good as natural parents. He also said that “we will be more American on the day we permit same-sex marriage” and give gays human dignity….
Maureen Dowd, this is only “inexplicable” because you did not bother asking your assistant to do five minutes of research on this question.
If you had showed an ounce more curiosity, you would discover that David’s argument about same-sex marriage is one of “goods in conflict” — the good of recognizing the equal dignity of homosexual love, as he puts it, and the good of recognizing children’s need to know and be known whenever possible by their mother and father.
He has written about that argument in the LA Times, in his book, and in ample other places.
Meanwhile, long before taking up the issue of gay marriage, he has spent, as founder and president of the Institute for American Values, more than twenty years naming, researching, and talking to America and the world about the problems, for children, of fatherlessness, divorce and non-marriage, and the like. Margaret Talbot summarized it nicely in the New Yorker blog in January. Ben Domenech summarizes it nicely today.
Moral of the story: Pick up the phone, go online, visit a library — do something — before you tell all of America that a person of seriousness and integrity has acted “inexplicably.”
Categories: Marriage
Goods in conflict – “the good of recognizing the equal dignity of homosexual love, as he puts it, and the good of recognizing children’s need to know and be known whenever possible by their mother and father” …
Wow, where is the conflict? The chain of “what if”‘s required to get from gay marriage to children not knowing their parents must travel through a string of hypotheticals not in evidence. I don’t see the connection. Nor do I see any other attempts by the state to guarantee that children know their parents. Nor do I remember anything in the constitution guaranteeing that children must be given the opportunity to know both their parents, although the Constitution does provide equal protection for gay and lesbian folks.
Throughout cultures and civilizations, poetry, literature, song and story have told of the young lovers whose love is thwarted by this or that villain. You know what role you’ve accepted in this drama. This will be your sad legacy.