“Modesty was decried as prudishness, and chastity ridiculed as either impossible or hypocritical. Experimentation abounded: the so-called “open marriages,â€? public intercourse, intercourse under the influence of psychedelic drugs. A few of the experiments fizzled out for a time, though they are now resurging, as witness the sewer of websites devoted to “swingers.â€?

“We were told that the legalization of abortion would lead, paradoxically, to fewer abortions, and fewer instances of child abuse. Instead it led to far more abortions than even the opponents ever imagined, and it so cheapened infant life that child abuse spiked sharply upward. It has remained so high that no one is surprised to hear, on local television, an account a child chained to his bed and allowed to starve in his own filth, or a baby bludgeoned to death by a boyfriend, with the mother as accomplice.”

“We were told that the legalization of contraceptive drugs would lead to fewer unwanted children — certainly to fewer children born out of wedlock. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the human race should have known otherwise. Whatever one may believe about contraception, one must admit the historical fact: by reducing the perceived risk of pregnancy almost to zero, contraception removed from the young woman the most powerful natural weapon in her arsenal against male sexual aggression. She no longer had any pressing reason not to concede to the boyfriend’s wishes. So she agreed; and we now have one of three children born out of wedlock. The sexual chaos has touched every family in the nation.”

“Some people reckon up the losses from this revolution in terms of percentages: of unwed mothers, of aborted pregnancies, of children growing up without a parent, usually the father. It will take artists of the most penetrating insight to reckon up the losses as they ought to be reckoned, in human misery.”

In other words, he has nothing to say about same-sex marriage, but rather opines about abortion, free-love, and contraception. Hardly good arguements.

On his second “point”, Esolen argues that men and women must be forced to get married for the good of society, because otherwise, they would not.

“The wedding is a symbol of the union of differences: the generations, certainly, and separate families, but most strikingly, man and woman. The very word sex derives from Latin sexus, denoting that which separates; it is cognate with a whole host of words for severance, such as (in English) schism, scissors, sect, shed. It is a mark of our degeneracy that the ugly term “having sexâ€? has come to mean the marital act, with the once delicate term “making loveâ€? similarly demoted. What man and woman do in the marriage bed is not “haveâ€? sex; the sex, that is the separation, they are provided with already. What they do is to unite, across the separation. And unless man and woman unite — and, given their differences, it always amazes me that they can — the culture cannot survive. The women will split away to protect their persons and their relatively few children; the unattached males will pass the dull hours in destruction.”

Again, I fail to see how this is a convincing arguement against same sex marriage.

Maybe religion is the only way to justify or argue against same-sex marriage (as marriage was traditionally a religious sacriment, until states decided to regulate such unions when marriage became more about property rights than actual love, commitment, and the raising of children).

So I look forward to reading installments 3-10 from Esolen (unless installments 2-4 are anything like these first two), and I hope he actually finds something a little bit more convincing next time.