David Blankenhorn, a national figure in the movement against same-sex marriage, has recanted his opposition, saying “the time has come for me to accept gay marriage and emphasize the good that it can do.” 
 
 Mr. Blankenhorn, the founder and president of the Institute for American Values, wrote an influential book that argued against same-sex marriage in 2007, called “The Future of Marriage,” and served as an expert witness against the constitutional challenge to California’s Proposition 8, which limited marriage to heterosexuals. On Friday, he said in an opinion article for The New York Times, published online, and in an hour-long documentary on NPR that his concerns about same-sex marriage remained, but that “the time for denigrating or stigmatizing same-sex relationships is over.” 
 
 “I opposed gay marriage believing that children have the right, insofar as society makes it possible, to know and to be cared for by the two parents who brought them into this world,” he wrote in the article. He said he still held that conviction. But he added, “Whatever one’s definition of marriage, legally recognizing gay and lesbian couples and their children is a victory for basic fairness.” 
 
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 Mr. Blankenhorn’s onetime allies said they were troubled but unimpressed. 
 
 “He’s dead wrong,” said the Rev. Jim Garlow, senior pastor of Skyline Wesleyan Church in La Mesa, Calif. “I am a student of history. Christianity has made clear that marriage is between one man and one woman. And what we have seen is that when you change marriage for some, you change marriage for all.” 
 
 The focus on same-sex marriage has grown rapidly in recent years, both legislatively and legally. Two requests for review of same-sex marriage rulings in federal courts, including the Proposition 8 case, are headed to the Supreme Court this summer. Other cases are being argued in lower courts, and referendum initiatives will be on the ballots in November in four states — Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington. 
 
 Last month, President Obama endorsed same-sex marriage after nearly two years of saying that his views on the topic had been evolving. Polls show public opinion has also been shifting rapidly toward acceptance of it, although about 30 states have passed constitutional amendments in recent years defining marriage as between only a man and a woman. 
 
 Six states — Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont — as well as the District of Columbia permit same-sex marriage. Nine others — California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Oregon and Washington — allow comprehensive domestic partnerships or civil unions granting same-sex couples full rights except in name. 
 
 Mr. Blankenhorn, who was raised in the South and attended Harvard, had long stood out among opponents of same-sex marriage because he did not invoke a biblical or religious justification and did not oppose civil unions for gay men and lesbians. Instead, he argued that marriage was society’s most important institution and had in recent decades come under attack, and that same-sex marriage was only adding to its decline. 
 
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 He said that he had long hoped the debate over same-sex marriage would center on parenthood, not private relationships, but that in the public’s mind today the issue was simply about equality for gay men and lesbians — in other words, civil rights. 
 
 “And to my deep regret,” he wrote, “much of the opposition to gay marriage seems to stem, at least in part, from an underlying antigay animus. To me, a Southerner by birth whose formative moral experience was the civil rights movement, this fact is profoundly disturbing.” 
 
 Mr. Blankenhorn has long had his fans in the pro-gay-rights community. Andrew Sullivan, who writes for The Daily Beast, wrote on Friday that Mr. Blankenhorn was “perhaps the most clearly decent, intellectually honest, nonhomophobic opponent of marriage equality.” He praised him for his switch. 
 
 Peter S. Sprigg, the senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council in Washington, which opposes same-sex marriage, said Mr. Blankenhorn’s new position was unfortunate but was, in his view, a result of social pressure and his eagerness not to be seen as antigay. 
 
 “He has thrown marriage under the bus for the sake of the homosexual movement,” Mr. Sprigg said. ||||| David Blankenhorn, founder of the Institute for American Values, has written a thoughtful short essay for the New York Times on why he has devoted considerable effort to defeating efforts to legalize same-sex civil marriage and why he has decided to embrace a new strategy. He notes that he had hoped that our national conversation about same-sex marriage would evolve into a broader conversation about the centrality of marriage and child-rearing, yet he sees no sign of that happening. So he concludes on the following note: 
 
 Instead of fighting gay marriage, I’d like to help build new coalitions bringing together gays who want to strengthen marriage with straight people who want to do the same. For example, once we accept gay marriage, might we also agree that marrying before having children is a vital cultural value that all of us should do more to embrace? Can we agree that, for all lovers who want their love to last, marriage is preferable to cohabitation? Can we discuss whether both gays and straight people should think twice before denying children born through artificial reproductive technology the right to know and be known by their biological parents? Will this strategy work? I don’t know. But I hope to find out. 
 
 Blankenhorn’s current position closely parallels my own. It is worth noting, however, that Blankenhorn’s new strategy actually represents a harder road than opposition to the legalization of same-sex civil marriage. Opponents of same-sex civil marriage will from time to time achieve concrete political victories. Those who want to reestablish the cultural centrality of marriage, in contrast, won’t have concrete victories to celebrate. Rather, they will have to navigate a fragmented cultural landscape in which it is crucially important to understand the difference between simple contagions and complex contagions, an idea a very good friend explained to me relatively recently. 
 
 The following is the abstract of a paper by Damon Centola and Michael Macy: 
 
 The strength of weak ties is that they tend to be long—they connect socially distant locations, allowing information to diffuse rapidly. The authors test whether this “strength of weak ties” generalizes from simple to complex contagions. Complex contagions require social afﬁrmation from multiple sources. Examples include the spread of high-risk social movements, avant garde fashions, and unproven technologies. Results show that as adoption thresholds increase, long ties can impede diffusion. Complex contagions depend primarily on the width of the bridges across a network, not just their length. Wide bridges are a characteristic feature of many spatial networks, which may account in part for the widely observed tendency for social movements to diffuse spatially. 
 
 Crudely, it is interesting to think about “wide bridges” in the context of the diffusion of various social practices. In the United States, divorce levels have decreased among college-educated women since 1980, as Kay Hymowitz has observed. Yet this hasn’t translated to non-college-educated women, in part, presumably, because we don’t (to overgeneralize) have “wide bridges” in U.S. society between the college-educated and the non-college-educated. 
 
 This has important implications for cultural conservatives. Family disruption in the United States is increasingly pervasive, yet it remains concentrated in groups that tend not to see elite non-black and non-Latino conservatives as culturally credible. That is part why the message Blankenhorn is articulating isn’t resonating with the constituencies for whom it is (arguably) most relevant. There are, of course, many cultural conservatives in the communities most heavily impacted by family disruption, but it’s not clear that these individuals have the kind of cultural and spiritual authority they’d need to make a significant difference, partly because social uplift is seen as primarily state-driven and not community-driven. That is, I don’t turn to the pastor or deacon to weather a family crisis. I turn to the state for transfers or for other forms of care, as alternative social networks are too weak by comparison or too overburdened. So why would the pastor or deacon hold sway? I should stress that this is a serious oversimplication, but I do think it helps explain the larger landscape. ||||| Judge Vaughn R. Walker is not Anthony Kennedy. But when the chips are down, he certainly knows how to write like him. I count—in his opinion today—seven citations to Justice Kennedy's 1996 opinion in Romer v. Evans (striking down an anti-gay Colorado ballot initiative) and eight citations to his 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas (striking down Texas' gay-sodomy law). In a stunning decision this afternoon, finding California's Proposition 8 ballot initiative banning gay marriage unconstitutional, Walker trod heavily on the path Kennedy has blazed on gay rights: "[I]t would demean a married couple were it to be said marriage is simply about the right to have sexual intercourse," quotes Walker. "'[M]oral disapproval, without any other asserted state interest,' has never been a rational basis for legislation," cites Walker.* "Animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate," Walker notes, with a jerk of the thumb at Kennedy. 
 
 Justice Kennedy? Hot sauce to go with those words? 
 
 But for all the lofty language about freedom and morality, nobody can fairly accuse Judge Walker of putting together an insubstantial or unsubstantiated opinion today. Indeed, the whole point of this legal exercise—the lengthy trial, the spectacularly detailed finding of facts (80 of them! with subheadings!)—was to pit expert against expert, science against science, and fact against prejudice. 
 
 It's hard to read Judge Walker's opinion without sensing that what really won out today was science, methodology, and hard work. Had the proponents of Prop 8 made even a minimal effort to put on a case, to track down real experts, to do more than try to assert their way to legal victory, this would have been a closer case. But faced with one team that mounted a serious effort and another team that did little more than fire up their big, gay boogeyman screensaver for two straight weeks, it wasn't much of a fight. Judge Walker scolds them at the outset for promising in their trial brief to prove that same-sex marriage would "effect some twenty-three harmful consequences" and then putting on almost no case. 
 
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 Walker notes that the plaintiffs presented eight lay witnesses and nine expert witnesses, including historians, economists, psychologists, and a political scientist. Walker lays out their testimony in detail. Then he turns to the proponents' tactical decision to withdraw several of their witnesses, claiming "extreme concern about their personal safety" and unwillingness to testify if there were to be "recording of any sort." Even when it was determined that there would be no recording, counsel declined to call them. They were left with two trial witnesses, one of whom, David Blankenhorn, founder and president of the Institute for American Values, the judge found "lacks the qualifications to offer opinion testimony and, in any event, failed to provide cogent testimony in support of proponent's factual assertions." Blankenhorn's credentials, methodology, lack of peer-reviewed studies, and general shiftiness on cross examination didn't impress Walker. And once he was done with Blankenhorn, he turned to the only other witness—Kenneth P. Miller—who testified only to the limited question of the plaintiffs' political power. Walker wasn't much more impressed by Miller, giving his opinions "little weight." 
 
 Then come the elaborate "findings of fact"—and recall that appellate courts must defer far more to a judge's findings of fact than conclusions of law. Here is where Judge Walker knits together the trial evidence, to the data, to the nerves at the very base of Justice Kennedy's brain. Among his most notable determinations of fact, Walker finds: states have long discriminated in matters of who can marry; marital status affects immigration, citizenship, tax policy, property and inheritance rules, and benefits programs; that individuals do not choose their own sexual orientation; California law encourages gay couples to become parents; domestic partnership is a second-class legal status; permitting same-sex couples to marry does not affect the number of opposite-sex couples who marry, divorce, cohabit, or otherwise screw around. He found that it benefits the children of gay parents to have them be married and that the gender of a child's parent is not a factor in a child's adjustment. He found that Prop 8 puts the force of law behind a social stigma and that the entirety of the Prop 8 campaign relied on instilling fears that children exposed to the concept of same-sex marriage may become gay. (Brand-new data show that the needle only really moved in favor of the Prop 8 camp when parents of young children came out in force against gay marriage in the 11th hour of the campaign.) He found that stereotypes targeting gays and lesbians have resulted in terrible disadvantages for them and that the Prop 8 campaign traded on those stereotypes. 
 
 And then Walker turned to his conclusions of law, finding that under both the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses: 
 
 Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional. 
 
 Is that the end of it? Oh, no. Judge Walker is already being flayed alive for the breadth and boldness of his decision. The appeals road will be long and nasty. Walker has temporarily stayed the ruling pending argument on a stay. (Rick Hasen argues it may be wise for him to stay the order pending appeal for tactical reasons.) Any way you look at it, today's decision was written for a court of one—Kennedy—the man who has written most eloquently about dignity and freedom and the right to determine one's own humanity. The real triumph of Perry v. Schwarzenegger may be that it talks in the very loftiest terms about matters rooted in logic, science, money, social psychology, and fact. 
 
 Correction, Aug. 8, 2010: This line was erroneously attributed to Anthony Kennedy. It was actually written by Sandra Day O'Connor. (Return to the paragraph.) 
 
 
 
 Watch the reaction to the verdict from Proposition 8 plaintiffs: 
 
 
 
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– One of the most respected opponents of gay marriage has changed his mind, arguing that too many of his political comrades are simply prejudiced against gays and lesbians, the New York Times reports. David Blankenhorn, who wrote The Future of Marriage and argued for California's Proposition 8 as an expert witness, revealed his new opinion in the Times yesterday: "Whatever one's definition of marriage, legally recognizing gay and lesbian couples and their children is a victory for basic fairness," he wrote. He also hopes that by embracing gay marriage, he can "help build new coalitions bringing together gays who want to strengthen marriage with straight people who want to do the same." Reaction is, of course, mixed: "He has thrown marriage under the bus for the sake of the homosexual movement," said Peter Sprigg, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council. Sprigg blamed Blankenhorn's position on a desire not to be seen as anti-gay. "Blankenhorn's current position closely parallels my own," writes Reihan Salam in the National Review. But "Blankenhorn's new strategy actually represents a harder road than opposition to the legalization of same-sex civil marriage," because he "won't have concrete victories to celebrate." "David was a good man when he was opposed to marriage equality and he is a good man now," writes gay marriage advocate Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Beast. "We need more like him." Click for the full Times piece, or Blankenhorn's op-ed.