Playwright Tony Kushner and his partner Mark Harris have a letter in today’s New York Times (full text below) in response to David Blankenhorn, who was featured in an article over the weekend as a self-described liberal who opposes same-sex marriage.

First, an excerpt from the article about Blankenhorn:

Mr. Blankenhorn readily admits that the “deinstitutionalization” of marriage that he fears — the redefinition of what he considers the nation’s “most pro-child institution” as a private adult relationship stripped of public meaning — has been under way for a long time. Deeply rooted in American individualism and the quest for self-fulfillment, that redefinition “has been growing for decades, propagated overwhelmingly by heterosexuals.” Same-sex marriage only further erodes marriage as a pro-child institution, he believes.

When I read that on Saturday I got steamed.

Here’s Kushner and Harris’s letter in full, since it’s behind the Times paywall:

To the Editor:

Re “A Liberal Explains His Rejection of Same-Sex Marriage,” by Peter Steinfels (Beliefs column, June 23):

If there’s anything liberal in David Blankenhorn’s arguments against same-sex marriage, it went right by us. His opposition to same-sex marriage rests upon two familiar conservative notions: the view that interventive “protection” rather than encouragement is the best way to bolster the presumably threatened institution of marriage (the same foundation on which conservatives stood decades ago when they opposed racial intermarriage); and the idea that gay marriage is insufficiently “pro-child” to merit legitimation.

Significantly, Mr. Blankenhorn does not extend this second argument, which insults so many gay parents, to childless heterosexual couples. The basis of the discrimination he advocates, in other words, is homosexuality.

“Liberal” Mr. Blankenhorn reassures us that he isn’t a bigot and proposes an “interesting new conversation” in which same-sex couples who want to marry can learn to stop misjudging the people who would deprive us of the legal protections heterosexuals enjoy.

But the solution to our disenfranchisement is not a more amiable conversation with those who seek to perpetuate it, whatever their self-justifying pieties.

We call ourselves married, but we’re not, legally, and we want to be. We’re fans of the Declaration of Independence, the 14th Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education, and we want equal treatment under the law.

Mark Harris
Tony Kushner
New York, June 23, 2007

Incidentally, here’s Harris’s and Kusher’s wedding announcement in the Times from 2003.

Two women get married in Massachusetts; one of them legally takes her spouse’s name under state law; three years later, her application for a U.S. passport is rejected because the federal government won’t recognize the name change.

So Amanda Lison will have to go to Probate Court to get the name change recognized by the federal government, even though her married name appears on her driver’s license and Social Security card. (How’d it get on her Social Security card?)

“A spokesman from the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., said same-sex couples seeking a passport under a married name can’t do so absent additional documentation, and that the government doesn’t recognize such name changes based solely on marriage certificates, as it does for heterosexual married couples.”

There’s been lots of focus in the last few years on state-recognized same-sex marriage. People forget that there are about 1,138 federal rights that DOMA bars to gay couples, no matter how enlightened their own state might be.

We’ve got a long way to go.