This is on Beings Unheard Cut.

I'm Chris DeTippet.

You're listening to my unedited conversation with Jonathan Rausch and David Blankenhorn.

David Blankenhorn is founder and president of the Institute for American Values.

His books include The Future of Marriage and Fatherless America.

Jonathan Rausch is a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and a journalist.

He's author of Gay Marriage, Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straits, and Good for America.

I spoke with him on October 10, 2012 at a public event at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs of the University of Minnesota.

Download the MP3 of that produced show at onbeings.org.

I'd like to welcome you all for joining us here at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota,

and all of you watching live online.

OnBeings is recording this event for radio broadcasts, and you'll be able to watch the video again at onbeings.org.

America is driven by a number of different types of tensions and divisions, party ideology among them.

Those divisions are sorting where we live, what we do, who we talk to, and what we think.

Indeed, it's changing how we think.

You might think of the process of coming to a decision as a cognitive one, or we move from gathering facts to some sort of judgment.

We're now finding that our pre-existing beliefs and attitudes are actually driving our perception of fact in the way the world works.

And this is having dangerous and significant consequences for meaningful communication, communication in which reason, reflection, dialogue are all integral components.

The costs are high, misperception, inflated fears, lost opportunities for shared gains.

And the loss of the kind of community that many of us seek, community in which there's respect and acknowledgement of difference, because it exists, in which there's a moral dialogue that is guided by virtue and possibility and the search for a broader common good.

Today's conversation, the future of marriage with Jonathan Roush and David Blankenhorn, is the fourth and final public event in onbeings civil conversations project.

These conversations are taking on dynamics that epitomize the present chasems in American civil life, budgetarian economic crisis, politically engaged Christian action,

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