David Blankenhorn says he felt a sense
of relief in endorsing gay marriage.
Blankenhorn reversed course on the
issue in an op-ed last year titled How My View on Gay Marriage
Changed published in The
New York Times.
In 2010, Blankenhorn, the founder and
president of the conservative group Institute for American Values,
served as an expert witness in favor of California's gay marriage ban
at the trial challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8.
He also argued against gay nuptials in
his 2007 book The Future of Marriage.
Eight months after announcing his new
stance and as the case reaches the Supreme Court, Blankenhorn states
in a videotaped interview with Faith
in America that he felt “like a burden had been lifted.”
“I'm not saying this would happen to
everybody, but for me when I was able to change on this issue, it
felt like a burden had been lifted, you know. It just felt like I'd
been carrying around a weight. And it felt like the weight was just
not there,” Blankenhorn said.
“And I think it was because I had, I
felt that at some level I was, you know, pointing a finger of
condemnation at other people. And I was saying, 'Bad, you know,
these people bad, you know. Oh sin, wrong.'” (The video is
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