How A Star Witness In The Case Against Gay Marriage Became A Huge Gay Ally
One of the star witnesses for the anti-gay marriage camp in the 2010 Prop 8 trial was David Blankenhorn, a "traditional marriage advocate" and founder of the Institute for American Values.
In a bizarre turn of events, Blankenhorn is enlisting gays to support his cause, The New York Times reported this week.
On Thursday, Blankenhorn issued a call to arms to start a "new conversation on marriage." He argued everybody (gays included!) should be invested in promoting marriage and its benefits for child-rearing and financial stability.
"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," his statement says.
Blankenhorn's views on gay marriage have pretty much done a 180 since 2010.
During the Prop. 8 trial in California three years ago, Blankenhorn testified for seven hours on just one day, then-Berkeley Law student Amanda Beck wrote in a blog dedicated to the case.
Here's how Beck described Blankenhorn's testimony:
Blankenhorn’s primary testimony was that marriage is a socially-approved, sexual relationship between a man and a woman. He said this central feature appeared almost uniformly throughout human history and that almost every culture used marriage to fix a legal and social relationship between a child and her biological parents.
So, why does Blankehorn now think gays have a stake in the fight to "preserve" marriage?
In an explosive June 2012 op-ed in The New York Times, Blankenhorn revealed why he'd changed his stance. Essentially, he realized the anti-gay marriage movement was about bigotry.
"[T]o my deep regret, much of the opposition to gay marriage seems to stem, at least in part, from an underlying anti-gay animus," he wrote. "To me, a Southernor by birth whose formative moral experience was the civil rights movement, this fact is profoundly disturbing."