New York, etc.

Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin • Discussing David Blankenhorn, a once-star proponent for California’s controversial Proposition 8, and his shift towards supporting marriage equality, which he expressed in an op-ed in the New York Times, which you can read here.  Blankenhorn founded the Institute for American Values and testified in favor of Prop. 8 during the trial in California.  source (via • follow)

This asshat was a guest speaker in one of the best classes I’ve ever taken. Our professor, the lovely Jonathan Zimmerman of NYU, brought in two speakers, one for and one against gay marriage. It’s obvious which side he was on. His main argument circled around the idea that a family should contain the biological mother and father, and that any other familial union stems from tragedy. Because he so vehemently believes that all children would go looking for their biological parents (which is valid), a same-sex couple raising a child is denying said child of something so fundamental that their marriages should not be recognized. Not getting the leap in logic here? Neither did my class. We kept trying to get an answer to why it was so fundamentally important to have the biological father be around in a loving, fully functioning, lesbian family, and he just kept stonewalling us. The idea that kids who grow up in gay families fare, on average, no better or worse than those in straight families, made on difference to him. He claimed that even if that were true, gay marriages should not be recognized by the state. He was deaf to the dangers of not recognizing the custodial rights of the non-biological or non-adoptive gay parent. If his op-ed is to be believed he hasn’t changed his mind about any of this - he’s just accepting that his bigotry is slowly becoming less and less defensible. There’s a reason this guy crapped-out at the Prop 8 trial.