Thursday, March 15, 2007

Want to be a rebel? Defend the obvious

The "natural law is what Eros says it is" crowd has put in a fresh clip. (So much for gun control, eh?) The safety is off. It is taking aim. At the enemy.

Who is David Blankenhorn . . . liberal Democrat?

Say what?

Hey, if it's in USA TODAY, it must be so:

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.

"I'm not condemning homosexuality. I'm not condemning committed gay relationships," he says. But "the best institutional friend that children have is marriage, and if grownups make a mess of it, the children are going to suffer."

Blankenhorn's attempts to raise consciousness about the importance of fathers led him to help inspire the creation of the National Fatherhood Initiative, a non-partisan group promoting responsible fatherhood. For 20 years, he has focused attention on the fallout of what he sees as a breakdown in the family.

He bristles when people call his think tank conservative; he wants to look deeply at America's core values, and he sees the Manhattan-based Institute for American Values, founded in 1987, as a catalyst for analysis and debate among those with differing views.

The institute's budget of some $1.5 million largely comes from foundations, corporations and individual donations, which support studies, conferences, books and other publications.

"People who say we're a conservative organization are just trying to call us names because they think it'll stigmatize us," he says, clearly rankled that his motives are so often misunderstood.

But as much as his passion for families impresses those who know his work, his blunt outspokenness can be off-putting to people on both sides of the political spectrum. He even criticizes the marriage movement, of which he is considered one of the founders, saying it has "stagnated."

"It's one of the reasons I wrote the book," he says. "I want to stir the pot as much as I can."

THIS GOES TO SHOW YOU. No matter how pure your motives, no matter how impeccable your ideological credentials, no matter how frickin' OBVIOUS any particular cold, hard fact of life might be, you can borrow a whole heapin' helpin' o' trouble for having the temerity to say it out loud.

And the only difference between that state of affairs and some sort of Stalinist police state is . . . well, only the getting tortured and thrown in jail forever part. But between Alberto Gonzales and the Gayfellas, that'll be worked out soon enough.



HAT TIP: Crunchy Con

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