At Public Discourse, Maggie Gallagher responds to David Blankenhorn’s acceptance of gay marriage. See the full article here.
David Blankenhorn is my friend and I love him. I also respect him. I understand what he just did and why he did it and I wish him well in his personal fight to somehow square the circle, to combine a culture of gay marriage with a renewed culture of marriage.
….
But here’s what I want to say to David and to you: a comity that is bought by surrendering principle is submission, not comity at all. The truth about something as important as marriage cannot be the price we pay to live with each other.
The challenge of our time—and it is a deep challenge, not an easy one—is to find new ways to combine truth and love. Giving up marriage is too high a price to pay. And it is not the last good we will be asked to surrender, unless we find the courage to stand.
Categories: Marriage, The Future of Parenthood
Correction: It’s a study from 11/2011 relying on 2009 data, and the table I was referring to is here.
Barry Deutsch (writes)
“So do you think Kim is lying when he says that he hasn’t been successful at persuading many people to support his view?”
No- But simply because people dont want to sign on to a even more radical agenda dosent mean that there worldview dosent lend itself to further manipulation of marriage twoard further deinsitutionalization.
Indeed Kim asserts much the same when he speaks of the “Baby steps” required in such movements.
“It’s obvious that many of the leaders of the argument for marriage equality are already David’s allies in wanting a stronger marriage culture — Dale Carpenter is one of several names that come to mind.”
Both David Carpenter and Jonathan Rauch strike me as momentary feints in a longer campaign to deinsitutionalize marriage. Its not that they are not sincere, rather it is that larger cultural left is not interested in bringing down divorce or addressing fatherlessness because it is contrary to the ideology of sexual liberation, personal atonomy & gender “equality”.
People like David & John are simply being hilighted at present because there views are less radical. Not because the cultural left has embraced monogomy as a norm or “two parent” childraising as important.
How many times must the holes in this argument be pointed out before you address them, Fitz? Same-sex marriage does not do this. If anything, same-sex couples adopting might do that, but that is already legal in all 50 states. I have to join in with those who have been asking you, should same-sex couples be prohibited from adopting children?
And what about men in prison who get married? The Supreme Court has found that those men have a civil right to marry, just like everyone else. Do you think that sends the message that fathers are not crucial in child-rearing? Why are you spending so much time on the issue of same-sex marriage, which has yet to be proven is harmful to children, while ignoring the fact that men in prison are allowed to marry, even though we know that having a father in prison is harmful to children?
“Yes, by the illigetamacy rate.”
Illegitimacy means you were born out of wedlock not that you are fatherless. If being born out of wedlock is a bad thing, isn’t that one more reason to support same-sex marriage, so the children being raised by same-sex couples don’t suffer from illegitimacy?
It very telling that Fitz continues to dodge this question. Fitz, why are you so reluctant to engage and address the various criticisms of your view?
To be fair, Spencer, many opponents of SSM on this site have been asked variations on that same basic question over the past few weeks, and as far as I’ve seen, no one has answered it. So it’s not just Fitz. But you’re right, the silence we get in response is very telling.
I have followed David’s arguments from the moment he started making them. I have read most of his books. He was always strong on liberal comity and short on resolve.
His current stance retracts nothing of his worldview about the damage & unacceptabilty of same-sex “marriage”.
Instead he has posited that a tactical retreat that surrenders on “marriage” can (somehow) cause the cultural left to embrace intact married childbearing for heterosexual couples.
That the cultural left and its mainstream media denizens will embrace a agenda of bringing down the rates of divorce and illigitamacy.
I suggest we embrace his experiment at face value and watch to see the crickets chirp around his new strategy. They will take the concesion and steamrole over his plea’s. These are the same people who watched the bottom drop out of the black family and did not miss a beat. Instead of concern about family breakdown we got same-sex “marriage”.
No sonner do I write this, when writer Richard Kim of The Nation welcomed David Blankenhorn’s defection on marriage as an opportunity to argue for further destabilizing marriage.
The cultural left dosent care about our culture of marriage or children having “two parents” beyond their current effort to redefine marriage. Once that has been accomplished they will go back to ignoring the consequences of their agenda.
Davids idea is misbegotten.
Fitz, please answer the questions I asked you.
Sorry Chris, I dont even remeber the question… We have all had these arguments so many times that it gets repeditive.. (let me guess = the definition of marriage has nothing to do with the cultural expectations of heterosexuals vis-vie childbearing/rearing…WHY? Because that dosent suit your agenda…oh)
The subject is Davids recent and (in my mind) totaly convoluted NEW stance for same-sex “marriage” that will (or will not) get the cultural left to embrace monogamy & a (new) “two parent” norm for hetro- and homosexual alike…
Maggie & myself think this is contradictory and muddled and imposible to jusitify.
I just wanted to add that the Richard Kim piece in the nation highlights what many see as the futility of Davids new approach.
Well, the great thing about the Internet is that you don’t have to remember anything. You could look at the questions I asked you, right now, simply by scrolling up! Amazing, right? I’m talking specifically about the questions I asked at 5:00 PM.
Really? These are the same people?
Do you mean that literally, or just in an ignorant, paint-everyone-I-disagree-with-with-the-same-brush kind of way?
After mulling….
I’m concerned about dichotomous thinking, a win/lose, us vs. them worldview that poisons the possibility for civil discourse. Defensiveness is my enemy. When I feel defensive, I cling to something – my tribe, my past statements – and find it harder to maintain an open mind. My chief tactic against this enemy is to STOP SEEING THE WORLD IN TERMS OF ENEMIES. I strive to see people who disagree with me merely as people who have a common goal of creating a good world, but have different ideas about what that world would look like and how to get there. It sounds naïve, I know, but there you have it.
I understand Blankenhorn’s remarks to reflect the idea that his chief goal is promoting optimal environments for child rearing, and that he regarded the defense of “traditional marriage” as a tactic toward that goal. Like a person who promoted Prohibition as a means to addressing the problem of chemical dependency, Blankenhorn has concluded that the tactic has proven unduly burdensome, especially to certain people. Thus, he is now abandoning that tactic, but not the goal.
But, for better or worse, Blankenhorn didn’t stop there. He also remarked on the possibilities that people who disagreed with him regarding same-sex marriage would now join him in the effort to promote optimal circumstances for child-rearing. And now various people on both the left and the right – I’m thinking of Fitz, but he is not alone – have seized upon this aspect of Blankenhorn’s comments. I sense this obsession is especially prevalent among people in a dichotomous, us-vs.-them mindset. They characterize Blankenhorn’s statement as a kind of negotiated settlement – I’ll surrender this if my enemies surrender on that – and then predict that the enemies will not comply.
Now, I have no problem with Blankenhorn expressing his aspiration. But it’s rather like expecting people who opposed Prohibition to join in the effort to manage chemical dependency. There’s really no special reason to imagine that they would. Sure, some will. But the great majority of people were not actively engaged in the issue of chemical dependency, and there was really no reason to expect Prohibition opponents to differ from the majority of people on this variable.
So, I share in the predictions of Fitz, et al., that Blankenhorn’s remarks will not trigger a new groundswell of concern about child-rearing. But I don’t share the view that this dynamic invalidates Blankenhorn’s reasoning. In brief, the people who argued that Prohibition was bad public policy were justified in seeking the repeal of Prohibition, REGARDLESS of their views on chemical dependency. If you show me a poll demonstrating that most of the people who opposed Prohibition didn’t give a fig about chemical dependency, it would not alter my conclusion that Prohibition was bad public policy. Similarly, if you show me a poll demonstrating that most people who support state recognition of same-sex marriage don’t give a fig about child-rearing, it would not alter my conclusion that prohibitions on the marriages of same-sex couples is bad public policy.
There’s no reason to expect any relationship between these policies – unless we fall into a dichotomous mindset, and see the world in terms of what WE have to give up to solicit a reciprocal act from THEM.
I hope we can transcend that. I realize that it’s easier for me to say that, given that my policy preferences seem to be ascending these days so I’m not feeling defensive just now. But, as I noted for Blankenhorn, there’s no harm in expressing aspirations, right?
Fitz you put a lot of weight on marriage making men fathers. I was wondering if you thought marriage alone should be enough to make a person the legal parent of their spouses child? I don’t. I think it makes them a step parent and that is how it should be recorded. Adoption would make them an adoptive parent but only having offspring should make you a legal parent.
Do you think a single man with offspring is a father if the mother was married when she conceived the child during an affair? I’m wondering how committed you are to children being denied their fathers. If your really committed to children being denied their fathers you would recognize the unmarried man as the father of a child born out of wedlock or born of an extramarital affair. If your really committed to making sure children are not raised fatherless you would never think it was ok for the husband of a woman to be named as the child of his wife’s offspring with another man.