Talk:David Blankenhorn

This article is not about David Blankenhorn
What is going on in this article? It is not about the man/author/founder and president of the Institute for American Values. It is about the Perry Trial testimonies.

I could see a small section about the Perry Trial in a true biographical entry. But to suggest that Blankenhorn's sole contribution to marriage discussions is the Perry Trial is irresponsible.

I am no expert about the man, but having read his book, The Future of Marriage, I find this article narrowly focused on an event instead of a person and as such, politically tainted. His opinions may not reflect popular thinking, but they are not without some compelling data and the man and his organization have been actively working in the family and marriage space for a long time. Why is none of that in this supposed biography? Tarsa (talk) 23:02, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Because you have not written it there. There is not some base set of employees writing wikipedia to ensure its completeness. (It should be noted that we tend to cover notable people on the topic of why they are notable, however, and as discussed below, the Perry Trial is central to his notability.) This is a fairly new article, and it's only been around since January of this year to build up to what it is. (Also, the achievements of his Institute would better be covered in an article on said Institute, rather than here.) --Nat Gertler (talk) 02:21, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

"Not qualified as an expert witness"
In the Proposition 8 case, the court wrote that "The court therefore finds the opinions of Blankenhorn to be unreliable and entitled to essentially no weight." However, I believe this was only in the context of the case at hand, so that saying that the court ruled that he "was not qualified as an expert witness" is too broad.

Can someone confirm (or deny) this? Should the subject matter on which he was determined to be unqualified be specified? -- Dan Griscom (talk) 15:04, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I think you're reading into this the wrong use of the term "qualified". It does not mean having sufficient ability, but rather passing through a test. I may have a horse that is fast enough to win The Kentucky Derby, but if I have not entered him in the appropriate qualifying races, then he was not qualified. Sufficient positive information about DB's expertise was not presented, and his testimony was not in a form that established such expertise, so he was not qualified for expert testimony. Unless you can point to some other case, there is no topic on which he has been qualified as an expert witness. --Nat Gertler (talk) 20:55, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

"Qualified" is a a term of art; thus the current wording is not too broad. It goes without saying that Judge Walker wasn't attempting to preclude Blankenhorn from testifying as an expert witness and any and all future trials, but he did rule that Blankenhorn was not an expert witness on any issue that he testified on at the trial, and thus was not qualified as an expert. Savidan 21:08, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

It's getting a bit coatracky
This article is becoming overwhelmed by material related to Mr. Blankenhorn's testimony in Perry. Really the bulk of that material properly belongs on the article for that case, and here we should just note that after permitting him to testify over the objections of the plaintiffs who pointed to his lack of formal qualifications and peer reviewed publications in the field, Judge Walker ruled that "[his] testimony constitutes inadmissible opinion testimony that should be given essentially no weight."

Some of the extraneous material may be useful in expanding the article on Perry, and some of it may be useful in describing Blankenhorn's personal views where they cannot be adequately and accessibly summarised by quoting from his books and other publications. Tasty monster (=TS ) 13:03, 7 August 2010 (UTC)
 * To be fair, Blankenhorn's testimony appears to be key to his notability, or at least based on the hit count of a quick couple of google searches ("David Blankenhorn" vs. "David Blankenhorn" -Walker, to exclude pages with the name of the trial judge). --Nat Gertler (talk) 13:54, 7 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I partially concur. I've read articles in the New Yorker and the New York Times that focuses specifically on Blankenhorn's testimony, not on the trial generally. It's safe to say that (even though I believe he was a public figure before testifying) he is primarily known for testifying in the trial by a significant percentage of people who arrive at this article. The solution will probably be to increase the other parts of his bio rather than to unreasonably decrease the sourced content about the trial to comport to an arbitrary metric of how much space it should take up. However, I agree that this article should not contain information about the trial, except as necessary to give basic context, that does not pertain to Blankenhorn specifically. Savidan 15:18, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

Full Name(s)
Mr Blankenhorn is referred to in almost all sources as "David Blankenhorn". But Google Books shows that on page 76 of "Families First: Report of the National Commission on America's Urban Families", there's a one-paragraph bio of him, headed "David Blankenhorn, III". An article "Deterioration of traditional marriage is harmful trend" in the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger (retrieved 2011-01-11) listed as by "David Blankenhorn" starts out "I'm the other David Blankenhorn. My son, the more noted one, is the founder and president of The Institute for American Values, a think tank based in New York, whose mission is to study and strengthen the family, and civil society." At the article's end, we have "David Blankenhorn of Madison is a retired insurance executive and a reader member of The Clarion-Ledge's Editorial Board." And at time of writing, 2011-01-11, the front page of the Institute for American Values's site links to that article, and saying that it's by "David Blankenhorn (Sr.)" (italics mine.)

I mention this firstly because there is this confusion of two names which only rarely appear with a generational suffix, and both are Notable and writers, so we have to be careful not to put data about one D.B. in the article about the other D.B., and there's the muddle that it's not just Jr and Sr, but instead III and Sr.

And I mention this secondly because there's folks who want to pin down exact full proper names for the article (at least including the person's middle name), and I want them to be aware of this puzzlement ahead. Moreover, at time of writing, there is no entry for the D.B. who wrote the Clarion-Ledger article. -- Sean M. Burke (talk) 14:07, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

Publications
There should really be a section listing Mr Blankenhorn's publications, major ones at least. Many are relevant to his Prop 8 testimony (and vice versa); but he has written on a spectrum of other subjects. Here's a list of what Amazon has of his: But I know basically nothing of the numerous and daunting (to me) templates and markup that are used for referring to publications, so I have to leave this task to others who know more, and who might wander by and see this. (And I thank them in advance!)
 * Amazon listing of his books

And for yet braver souls, I've just now run a WorldCat search on him, and I got this giant blob from the card catalog, listing his books (with many duplicate entries), but also articles, some inexplicably with fulltext in what I wanted as just card-catalog entries: Hooboy! -- Sean M. Burke (talk) 14:59, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
 * My text dump of a search on David Blankenhorn in WorldCat. (Note: 358KB of plaintext!)

Institute for American Values
Mr Blankenhorn is the founder and president of the Institute for American Values-- that institute, at time of me writing this, has no article, even though it is Notable and it is linked to by a good number of other en-wikipedia articles. (Cf. an apparently smaller organization's entry: National Fatherhood Initiative.) I am unfamiliar with how to make a stub for an organization, and would greatly appreciate if someone would whip something up for the IAV. Here's some odds and ends that I've run into that might be useful: Any takers? Otherwise I'll glob together something very very stubby. Sean M. Burke (talk) 15:26, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
 * The IAV's actual web site, of course (and mission statements there, etc)
 * The NY Daily News's search results on "Institute for American Values", some of which are articles by Mr Blankenhorn, some mentioning or quoting him, or mentioning the IAV, and some are just false hits that have nothing to do with this.
 * Sourcewatch's notes
 * Note that it's unrelated to the sounds-same "Institute for American Values" that Nichols College ran, before they renamed it in 1999.
 * It's unrelated to the sounds-similar American Values Institute.

Cleanup needed in Perry v Schwarzenneger section
While following a citation to confirm the quote, 'I believe that adopting same-sex marriage would be likely to improve the well-being of gay and lesbian households and their children.' (my motivation for checking that being the fact that he was a witness for the plaintiffs), I discovered that the reference—and all of the other equalrightsfoundation.org references—is to a seemingly unrelated Japanese site. Perhaps these same transcripts can be found at afer.org. I don't have time right now to chase this down and fix it. Can anyone help? Peter Chastain  [¡hablá!]  20:35, 18 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I have added archive links to the two citations that went to the now-repurposed URL. --Nat Gertler (talk) 22:09, 18 May 2021 (UTC)