David Blankenhorn wrote the book on opposition to gay marriage. It was highly praised by the likes of Robert P. George, Stanley Kurtz, and Maggie Gallagher. It was, I wrote at the time, the best single book making the case against SSM. Later, David was the expert witness who defended Proposition 8 in the constitutional challenge to that amendment — a case now at the certiorari stage before the Supreme Court. He spoke and debated and blogged prolifically against gay marriage. But over time his opposition softened.
In June he announced that he now supported marital protection for gay families. Others, like Charles Murray and David Frum, had previously changed their minds on gay marriage. But David’s defection from the anti-SSM cause was by far the most significant and damaging. He was a leading intellectual voice for anti-gay-marriage activists, a serious and longtime family scholar who could not be dismissed as a simple homophobe. David explained his change-of-heart in an op-ed in the the New York Times. It’s no secret that his think tank, the Institute for American Values, paid a huge cost in lost donors when he publicly revised his view.
Now David has gone a step further, cutting an ad in opposition to the Minnesota marriage amendment, which would constitutionally limit marriage to opposite-sex couples. Says David:
I’ve spent a decade or more fighting gay marriage. Is this helping to achieve the goal that I really want to achieve? Is this helping the society renew its commitment to the marital institution? Is this helping more children grow up in a stable two-parent [homes]? It wasn’t.
Produced by Minnesotans United For All Families (of which I’m the Treasurer), the video can be seen here:
David Blankenhorn Urges Minnesotans to Vote No