Re-hopefull-ish-ness

"This court is adjourned."

-Schwarzenegger

I've got this strange feeling, this here-to-for un-experienced sense of...I don't know...what's the opposite of soul-crushing despair at the state of civilization? Is there even a word for it? Re-hopefull-ish-ness? Anyway I'd never heard of David Blankenhorn before this morning but he's actually restored some of my faith in humanity. So who the hell is this guy? At first blush he sounds like one of the people I'd like to trade in to get Jim Henson or Madeline Khan back. I mean he defended Prop 8 in Perry Vs. Schwarzenegger. Sure, his side lost but still, that's pretty douchy.

He also wrote a book called The Future of Marriage which is about how gay couples make terrible parents because they can't both be biologically related to their children which is absolutely essential and the reason that all adopted children grow up to be sociopaths. Science.

In his follow-up, Marriage of the Future, Blankenhorn argues that raising your children
in a vast and hostile galaxy is perfectly healthy, as long as you're not both dudes.

Without marriage, our civilization
will quickly crumble into
hopelessness and Thunderdomes.

Oh, and Blankenhorn is also the founder of the socially conservative and somewhat churchy-sounding Institute for American Values: a group dedicated to the promotion of marriage. According to the IAV, getting married isn't just some sexist and outmoded form of property exchange left over from the Bronze Age, nor is it a flimsy pretext with which to extort gift cards and smoothie makers from your friends. For them, marriage is no less than the very glue that holds our society together and the only thing between us and total anarchy. In fact, their website draws a connection between the rising divorce rate and 9-11.

So how the hell does a right-wing Prop-8 thumper like that give me a warm fuzzy of renewed optimism? He reversed his position, that's how. Wait-waaah?

Yesterday, if given the choice between a social conservative coming to his senses about the
injustice and homophobia inherent in opposing marriage equality and a goddamned unicorn,
I would have chosen the unicorn as the thing I'd most likely see today. 

Ted got Nicole, and his family got 80
gold ducats and 130 head of cattle.
Let's hear it for traditional marriage. 

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Blankenhorn has come out in support of legalizing same-sex marriage. It's not a total reversal, he still stands by traditional (or 'vanilla') marriage as his favorite method of transferring ownership of a woman from her father to her husband, but he says it's time to end the fight against marriage equality in the name of 'basic fairness' and just getting along with one another. Wait a minute, fairness? Getting along? Say...that doesn't sound like discourse in American politics...where's the vitriol? The name-calling? The Hitler comparisons? What gives?

If David Blankenhorn and the Institute for American Values can abandon the homophobia and junk science of the anti-equality movement, can the rest of the right be far behind? Could we be looking at the end of us versus them and the beginning of open and rational discussion? That thing you're feeling? That's re-hopefull-ishness.

"Luke...join me and together we will come to an equitable agreement that will satisfy
the needs of both the Empire and the Rebel Alliance. There's really no need for this
destructive conflict to go on, I mean we're both reasonable people here..."

-Darth Consensus-Builder