PEOPLE
2007 September6, Thursday

Family Man With a Cause (1/3)

For 20 years, David Blankenhorn has focused attention on the fallout resulting from breakdown in the family

David Blankenhorn may be best known as an advocate for the importance of fathers, but the 51-year-old think-tank founder and author is about to step onto the firing line with a much more controversial issue: gay marriage.

The Harvard-educated Mississippi native has made a career of thinking about big issues and telling others what he sees. 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, "The best institutional friend that children have is marriage, and if grownups make a mess of it, the children are going to suffer."

Misunderstood motives

Blankenhorn 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.

Vocabulary Focus

firing line (n .phr) ---the leading position in any movement or activity, especially one that iscontroversial

bristle (v)---to react angrily or become offended

stigmatize (v)---to treat someone unfairly by disapproving of them

rankle (v)---to cause annoyance or anger that lasts a long time

Specialized Terms

think-tank (idiom) ---智库a group of people established in order to advise on particular subjects

gay marriage (n. phr) ---同性婚姻marriage between two people of the same gender

op-ed (adj) ---民意论坛的；社论的describes a type of newspaper writing which expresses a personal opinion; an editorial