David Blankenhorn may be best known as an advocate for the importance of fathers, but the 51-year-old think-tank founder and author is about to step onto the firing line with a much more controversial issue: gay marriage.
The Harvard-educated Mississippi native is a former VISTA volunteer and community organizer who has made a career of thinking about big issues and telling others what he believes. He's written scores of op-ed pieces and essays, co-edited eight books and written two: the 1995 Fatherless America, which attributes many of society's ills to the lack of involvement of fathers in children's lives, and now, The Future of Marriage. In it, he argues kids need both a mother and a father, and because same-sex marriage can't provide that, it's bad for society and kids.
"We're either going to go in the direction of viewing marriage as a purely private relationship between two people that's defined by those people, or we're going to try to strengthen and maintain marriage as our society's most pro-child institution," he says.
He may sound like a conservative Christian, but Blankenhorn says he's a liberal Democrat.
Watch some on the left describe Blankenhorn as a stalking horse for the troglodytic theocons because he doesn't toe the ideological line on this issue.
Anyway, I think Blankenhorn is right, and I wish him well. I'll probably end up writing a column on his book. The thing I want to talk to him about, though, is how you go about renewing respect among the general heterosexual population for the constraints that come with traditional marriage, especially when we live in a culture that constantly posits individual self-expression and self-fulfillment as the absolute telos of human existence?
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Sorry about that--I was typing my post when you were posting! :)
I apologize for the misunderstanding, Erin. I thought just a few posts ago you said love and a lifelong committment wasn't enough to warrant marriage. So I thought what's the one thing that separates your people and my people, and the only answer I could come up with (since we've ruled out procreation as a reason as both the infertile and the elderly are exempted) is the sex. There's evidence that supports this view - y'all can't have sex til you're married. The reason why we're not ever supposed to have sex is because sex is supposed to be for the married folks. Well, since you won't let us marry, it's celibacy or hell in your world for your gays.
It's sad.
At any rate, whatever reasons people with your religious beliefs have for getting married, surely there has to be room in this country for people who have different ones than yours to have them honored. That's all I'm saying.
Hello again, GIITV. Once again, I think I need to clarify. Since you'd mentioned religious beliefs re: marriage, I wanted to respond to that.
However, I still think it's impossible for civil marriage, in the law, to codify whether or not people will love each other. About the best the law can come up with is to spell out that in certain egregious violations of the marriage contract, a party to the marriage may sue for its dissolution without the consent of, and possibly even facing opposition by, the other party. I really do think the only reason civil law cares about marriage at all is that the benefits, tax breaks etc. are supposed to be for the benefit of the new citizens marriage can and does produce. And the only reason the law doesn't require marriage license applicants to prove their fertility is that the law sees this as an unjust intrusion with no real purpose; it is sufficient, for the law's purposes, that the VAST MAJORITY of marriages will produce children. If we rewrite the law to allow same-sex couples to marry, we immediately change the law's presumptions in this area. I have yet to see a detailed proposal for how we will do this without unleashing total chaos and insanity on our marriage laws, from anyone who favors same-sex marriage. Your final point above, "At any rate, whatever reasons people with your religious beliefs have for getting married, surely there has to be room in this country for people who have different ones than yours to have them honored." speaks of religious beliefs again, but I still say that if the law is going to pretend that same-sex couples and heterosexual couples are EXACTLY the same in the eyes of the law, what on earth is the law going to do about that one glaring difference, the general ability and overwhelming propensity of the heterosexual couples to engage in reproduction and bear children? Ignore it? Create the legal fiction that it doesn't exist? Acknowledge it, but then bend over backward to insist that any and all recognition of the difference doesn't entitle the heterosexual couples to any special treatment, which would be illegal?
At that point, I'd favor abolishing civil marriage altogether, because I think it's just plain silly to pretend that the ability to reproduce is some kind of unimportant side effect of one type of marriage. One last thing I'd like to clarify, and this time we're back in the realm of my religious beliefs. You said, "The reason why we're not ever supposed to have sex is because sex is supposed to be for the married folks. Well, since you won't let us marry, it's celibacy or hell in your world for your gays." I'd state that a bit differently (generally, not so negatively). But to use the construct you did, in my Church, it's celibacy or hell for ALL of us except those who are married whose spouses a)still live with us and b) have not become incapacitated in that area of their lives due to illness or injury. The wife whose husband leaves her must be celibate. The husband whose wife is in a persistent vegetative state, but who could live for another 30 years, must be celibate. The woman who returns to the Catholic Church after a divorce and remarriage must, if no annulment to her first marriage is possible, live with her husband as his sister (if they have children, for example) or live in sin with him; it's still celibacy or hell. Priests who break their vow of celibacy, either with a woman, a man, or a child, have chosen hell instead of celibacy. As long as they live, though, they can undo that choice, by a reception of the Sacrament of Penance that includes a firm purpose of avoiding the sin in the future, a deliberate choosing of celibacy instead of hell. So it's not like gays are the only ones, in the Catholic Church, who are required to make this choice. In fact, even in marriage a husband and wife must practice marital chastity, which includes keeping your eyes on your own spouse, avoiding raunchy movies/books/etc., and approaching one's spouse in a spirit of love and understanding that doesn't put your own needs first. I mention all of this to illustrate where I'm coming from, personally. But as far as changing the definition of marriage in the law, I still think the court in MA failed to explain, if being able to reproduce is completely unimportant to marriage in the law's eyes, why the law has any purpose interfering in marriage at all.
Having children is a choice, just as choosing a religion or choosing to get married. No one "chooses" to be gay or straight. The State is discriminating against a significant portion of the citizenry by denying access to equal protection under the law for an immutable characteristic of a citizen. It's wrong no matter how you look at it. If the state wants to start giving away "baby vouchers" or something, that's one thing - but to deny the right of equal protection to same-sex couples because of the gender of one of the participants runs counter to everything our Constitution means. I, too, would rather the State simply abolish all association with marriage civilly than allow this discrimination to continue.
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