David Blankenhorn Supports Marriage Equality

David Blankenhorn has long been a high-profile opponent of marriage equality.  In the Prop. 8 trial, he was perhaps the most coherent and persuasive witnesses to testify in support of the California marriage ban.  He is the author of The Future of Marriage and is a founder of the conservative Institute for American Values.  Today, he announced on the pages of The New York Times that he has changed his position and now supports marriage rights.  He still stands by everything he ever said about the importance of heterosexual marriage, but he is a big enough man to recognize that "there are more things under heaven" than his beliefs and that "the dignity of homosexual love" demands legal recognition of our marriages.  He calls this "a victory for basic fairness."  He goes on to explain his disenchantment with the anti-gay marriage movement:

"I had hoped that the gay marriage debate would be mostly about marriage’s relationship to parenthood. But it hasn’t been. Or perhaps it’s fairer to say that I and others have made that argument, and that we have largely failed to persuade. In the mind of today’s public, gay marriage is almost entirely about accepting lesbians and gay men as equal citizens. And to my deep regret, much of the opposition to gay marriage seems to stem, at least in part, from an underlying anti-gay animus. To me, a Southerner by birth whose formative moral experience was the civil rights movement, this fact is profoundly disturbing."

Brave man.  I'm sure the character assassination on right-wing sites has already started.