By Ben Smith

July 25, 2004 | 8:00 p.m

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's widow, Elizabeth, was puzzled

to learn that her husband's name had been cited in the Senate debate over gay marriage. Republican Senators Sam Brownback of Kansas and John Cornyn of Texas are the New Yorker's unlikely new acolytes. "Senator Moynihan also wrote that 'the principle objective of American government at every level should be to see that children are born into intact families and that they remain so,'" Mr. Brownback said on July 12, explaining his opposition to gay marriage. Mrs. Moynihan didn't recognize that line from any of her husband's 19 books or many articles. "That doesn't sound like him," she said. Mrs. Moynihan has a point. The quote, it turns out, is a heavily doctored version of something Moynihan said on Meet the Press in 1993. The gist is the same-Moynihan, after all, had been sounding the alarm on the collapse of two-parent families since 1965. But the original quote lacks the total confidence so characteristic of the Senate majority. "What do we do?" NBC's Tim Russert had asked his old boss during a discussion of social policy. "We state, right now, the principal social objective of American national government at every level to be-if it can have any effect-is to see that children are born to intact families and that they remain so and that this become an object of the churches, of the society at large. And if you work at it, work at it, work at it, in about 40 to 50 years, you may have something to show for it," Moynihan replied. The Republicans' doctoring of Moynihan's quote reflects a broader tendency to cut corners in making a case against gay marriage. Call it, says the Brookings Institution's Jonathan Rauch, "defining Moynihan down," a nice echo of Moynihan's famous 1993 speech in which he coined the phrase "defining deviancy down." The central leap is from the widely accepted notion that children do better with two parents to a hazy link between gay marriage in Massachusetts and the high divorce rates that preceded it by more than 40 years. "People try to use muddled arguments when they won't use their real arguments," said Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who noted that Moynihan was an early ally of the gay-rights movement on the issue of employment discrimination and voted against the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. The real argument against gay marriage, he said, "is that one [homosexual] is enough, two together are revolting." Political opposition to gay marriage does rely on those who think homosexuality is a sin and even that gay sex should be criminal. But there are scholars, like David Blankenhorn at the Institute for American Values in New York, who make an argument against gay marriage that doesn't tacitly veer into bigotry. Putting it as clearly as it comes, he says gay marriage is "an effect that will become a cause" of the collapse of marriage. Like the Senators last week, he leans on Moynihan, who started talking about the crisis in American families in a then-controversial, now-obvious 1965 report entitled The Negro Family and the Case for National Action. "If there was one thing he did make clear over and over again, it was the importance of the two-parent, mother-father, married-couple family," Mr. Blankenhorn said. The problem with this is that, as the report's title indicates, Moynihan was concerned about African-American children and their single mothers, not gay and lesbian couples who are unlikely to find themselves with unwanted babies. The Senator seems not to have considered same-sex marriage directly. In his "defining deviancy down" speech, Moynihan approvingly quotes criticism of "alternative family structures;" but he added that, for his purposes, "alternative" means "other than two-parent families." He doesn't dwell on the gender of the parents. Mrs. Moynihan said she thought her husband would likely have supported same-sex marriage. "It's totally out of context [for the Republicans] to quote Pat on something like that," she said. "It was the breakup of the family that he was objecting to. Gay marriage, that's people saying marriage is good." Most of Moynihan's old aides and colleagues declined to speak for a Senator whose views were hard to predict while he lived. Harvard's Nathan Glazer e-mailed that "perhaps James Q. Wilson would risk a quote." Mr. Wilson, famous for his work on "broken windows" and crime, wouldn't channel Moynihan's views on gay marriage, but added, "I doubt he would have favored amending [the Constitution] in order to define marriage." On that question, too, Senators Brownback and Cornyn have chosen the wrong ally. Moynihan's views were clear: "There is nothing inherent in American democracy," he said in 1995, "that suggests we amend our basic and abiding law to deal with the fugitive tendencies of a given moment."