Advocates for same-sex marriage should feel embarrassed by current efforts to recycle the three most discredited ideas of the “Free Love” Revolution of the 1960’s.

Most Americans look back at the radical notions of that rebellious and drug-soaked era with skepticism and discomfort, if not outright regret. The sweeping changes in intimate relationships may have provoked excitement some forty years ago, but those alterations produced so many painful costs in terms of shattered families, degraded culture and proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases that even the most enthusiastic revolutionaries have come to reconsider the advisability of encouraging copulation without consequences or standards.

Nevertheless, arguments for redefining marriage (including the shockingly shallow logic behind last week’s Supreme Court decision in California) rely on shamelessly silly assumptions from the Age of Aquarius without acknowledging their dysfunctional history and unwholesome origins. The case for legal sanction for gay unions relies on the notions that it’s beneficial to separate sex from child-bearing, that every intimate urge deserves respect and fulfillment, and that males and females count, ultimately, as interchangeable.

1. Separating Sex, Marriage and Procreation. The British poet Philip Larkin announced the new order in human relationships in unforgettable terms in his poem “Annus Mirabilis”:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP

The principal facilitator for the new dispensation involved the development and dissemination of the birth control pill and other improved means of contraception. For the first time, young people could “go all the way” without fear of unintended, life-changing consequences. Legalized abortion (given Constitutional protection by Roe v. Wade in 1973) completed the explosion of the ancient association celebrated in another (anonymous) piece of poetry:

First comes love,
Then comes marriage,
Then comes Sally with a baby carriage.

The new ability to enjoy love without baby carriage also meant a new chance to indulge love without marriage… or a baby carriage without marriage, for that matter. The notion that Jr. ought to restrain himself or else he might get his best girl “in trouble” (and face a shotgun wedding) no longer carried weight. According to the core contention of the sexual revolution, intercourse represented a form of self-expression or even recreation, only occasionally (and unnecessarily) connected with procreation or long-term commitment. The result has been an explosion of out-of-wedlock birth (reaching 35% of all American new-borns in most recent numbers) with disastrous impact on poverty, crime and overall family stability.

Gay marriage won’t add to the out-of-wedlock birth rate (at least not directly) but it continues and advances the devastating disconnect of sex, marriage and babies. While society suffers from babies without marriage, gay matrimony guarantees marriage without babies. And while some heterosexual couples may prove as infertile, ultimately, as gay couples, only for a tiny minority of male-female marriages will there be the same certainty that exists for all homosexual relationships: that intimate expressions of affection can never produce progeny.

Yes, gay couples can raise kids who come to them through adoption or insemination, but in none of these relationships can there be an organic, physical, direct, causal connection between the love (and sex) exchanged between the partners and love for the progeny they produce – the very essence of a traditional marriage arrangement. With same sex union, the nature of marital sex receives a radical redefinition – disconnecting that intimacy from offspring even in a home where children may be present.

2. Following – and Honoring – Your Deepest Urges. Though I ought to be embarrassed to admit it, I actually hitch-hiked to San Francisco during the vaunted “Summer of Love” in 1967 and repeatedly encountered the slogan “If It Feels Good, Do It!” invoked with almost liturgical fervor. As an intrigued eye-witness to some of the public “Love Ins” and private social gatherings associated with that storied time and place, I can testify that this philosophy produced less fleeting fun, let alone long-term satisfaction, than widely assumed. Continued...