David Blankenhorn Quotations

We're just grateful to them in some real and intense way. Here in New York, people, they go up to these guys at the firehouses and in the streets, and they just want to say how grateful they are.

We've gone from debunking heroes to needing heroes. We're in a time of such danger and such physical vulnerability, and we need to be protected by the strong and the brave.

We've gone from debunking heroes to needing heroes, ... We're in a time of such danger and such physical vulnerability, and we need to be protected by the strong and the brave.

We have a need for heroes as a species, you know. That is one of the distinguishing traits of humans. We have a need to have an idealized sense of who we are at our best.

The most urgent domestic challenge facing the United States at the close of the 20th century is the re-creation of fatherhood as a social role for men.

Commenting on paternity establishment programs: What these millions of children want and need is not a name on a form or a promise that the sheriff will arrest these guys if they don't pay child support. What they want and need is in-the-home, love-the-mother fathers,. . .

Legislators in Kansas, Arizona and 23 other states who are properly determined to protect religious freedom can begin by asking themselves: Does any religious conviction justify denying lesbians and gays a basic legal promise of non-discrimination in hiring, public accommodations, and housing? Surely the answer to this question is no. Correcting that inequity would begin the process of recognizing that both sides - gay couples and religious objectors - have rights and that reasonable accommodation is possible only when both sides have something to gain.

A good father does these basic things: provides for his family, protects his family, and gives spiritual and moral guidance.

We would be more American on the day we permitted same-sex marriage than we were on the day before.

To recover the fatherhood idea, we must fashion a new cultural story of fatherhood. The moral of today's story is that fatherhoodis superfluous. The moral of the new story must be that fatherhood is essential.

When a man does not live with his children and does not get along with the mother of his children, his fatherhood becomes essentially untenable, regardless of how he feels, how hard he tries, or whether he is a good guy. Almost by definition, he has become de-fathered.

The U.S. is becoming an increasingly fatherless society. A generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up with his or her father. Today an American child can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is now approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of American childhood.

Defining and celebrating the New Father are by far the most popular ideas in our contemporary discourse on fatherhood. Father as close and nurturing, not distant and authoritarian. Fatherhood as more than bread winning. Fatherhood as new-and-improved masculinity. Fathers unafraid of feelings. Fathers without sexism. Fatherhood as fifty-fifty parenthood, undistorted by arbitrary gender divisions or stifling social roles.

More broadly across time and cultures, it seems, one perennial piece of advice to father has been the importance of acting tenderly toward their children. The New Father, it turns out, is an old story.

Children have a primal need to know who they are, to love and be loved by the two people whose physical union brought them here. To lose that connection, that sense of identity, is to experience a wound that no child-support check or fancy school can ever heal.

We’ve been fighting about gay marriage for what, 15-20 years now. Is there any evidence that fighting gay marriage is contributing to a greater appreciation among the broad society of the marital institution? Is there any evidence that the re-institutionalization of marriage is happening as a result of opposing gay marriage? And the best answer I can give to that is 'no.'

The most important domestic challenge facing the U.S. at the close of the twentieth century is the re-creation of fatherhood as avital social role for men. At stake is nothing less than the success of the American experiment. For unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments--not economic growth or prison construction or welfare reform or better schools--will succeed in arresting the decline of child well-being and the spread of male violence. To tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept the inevitability of continued social recession.

Even with all its problems, I will support marriage as an institution until something better comes along.

Up until September 11, we did live in an antiheroic age. Heroes were there to be debunked, criticized, made human, brought down to earth.

Up until September 11, we did live in an antiheroic age, ... Heroes were there to be debunked, criticized, made human, brought down to earth.

After all, we've been saying for a generation that fathers aren't really necessary. Why is it so shocking that some men are starting to believe it?

They are heroes because they protect us, you know? They go in where people are in danger, and they save their lives.