Feint of Heart
Kenneth D. Whitehead on a So-Called Truce in the War Against Marriage
I have never closely followed the work of David Blankenhorn, president and founder of the Institute for American Values (IAV), but I was aware that he was a defender of marriage and the family. About a dozen years ago, I edited a volume entitled Marriage and the Common Good; it consisted of the contributions of the speakers at a conference of the same name held in 1999. David Blankenhorn was one of those speakers and contributed a fine set of "Ten Short Reflections on the Relationships Between Divine and Human Fatherhood." I also knew he was the author of Fatherless America (1996) and co-editor of The Fatherhood Movement (1999), and that as recently as 2010 he was a star witness in the court proceedings over Proposition 8 in California, testifying in support of that initiative.
I was threfore startled—"shocked" would perhaps be a better word—last January to find him at the center of an article in the Washington Times announcing that "Activists Urge Gay-Marriage Truce to Save Institution." How marriage could be "saved" by redefining it to include same-sex relationships was not immediately obvious to me. The newspaper story reported how Blankenhorn's Institute for American Values had issued a statement declaring that the current culture war over so-called same-sex marriage needed to be brought to an end, and that both sides needed to join together to defend marriage generally—whether traditional marriage or what same-sex couples and their fellow travelers say is marriage.
"Marriage is fracturing in America," the story quoted the IAV statement as saying. "We propose a new conversation that brings together gays and lesbians who want to strengthen marriage with straight people who want to do the same."
The New York Times also ran a story on the IAV statement, entitled "In Shift, an Activist Enlists Same-Sex Couples in a Pro-marriage Coalition." The activist was, of course, Blankenhorn. It turned out that, six months earlier, in June 2012, he had written an op-ed article in the Times signaling a radical shift in his position: he had come to believe that same-sex relationships should be considered marriages. "Instead of fighting gay marriage," he'd written, in words later echoed by the IAV statement, "I'd like to help build new coalitions bringing together gays who want to strengthen their marriage with straight people who want to do the same."
IAV Realigns
It cannot be said that Blankenhorn does not have the courage of his new convctions. According to the New York Times article, because of his switch, a number of IAV board members, including Princeton professor Robert P. George, immediately resigned. Blankenhorn also reportedly lost up to half of the funding for his institute. One of his major donors, Sean Fielen, a hedge-fund partner, was quoted in the Times as faulting him for promoting "a very harmful myth about the gay lifestyle. It suggests that gay relationships lend themselvess to monogamy, stability, health and parenting in the same way that heterosexual relationships do. That's not true."
But apparently undeterred by such defections and loss of funding, Blankenhorn simply reached out to new donors and reconstituted the IAV board, taking on the Brookings Institution's William A. Galston, a former Clinton administration advisor; Francis Fukuyama, the well-known author of The End of History and the Last Man; and Jonathan Rauch, the author of Gay Marriage and a prominent advocate for that contemporary cause.
That Blankenhorn has enjoyed no little success in his new outreach would seem to be shown by the list of the signatories to his IAV manifesto. No fewer than 74 notables involved in marriage and family issues joined in his "Call for a New Conversation on Marriage."
Calling for a "New Conversation"
The full text of the Call can be found on the website of the Institute for American Values, but its operative paragraph reads as follows:
Kenneth D. Whitehead is the 2004 recipient of the Blessed Frederic Ozanam Award for Catholic Social Action of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists (SCSS). He writes frequently on Catholic social and moral issues.
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