Rev. Donald Sensing writes about expanding the legal definition of marriage to include homosexual couples on The Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal. After he cites the background on the pre-historic development of marriage and establishing the stake that society has in marriage as an institution, things start to get depressing.

Reverend Sensing accurately relates the effect that the invention of The Pill played in decoupling (no pun intended) the relationships between sex, pregnancy and marriage:

That led to what our grandparents would have called rampant promiscuity. The causal relationships between sex, pregnancy and marriage were severed in a fundamental way. The impulse toward premarital chastity for women was always the fear of bearing a child alone. The Pill removed this fear. Along with it went the need of men to commit themselves exclusively to one woman in order to enjoy sexual relations at all. Over the past four decades, women have trained men that marriage is no longer necessary for sex. But women have also sadly discovered that they can't reliably gain men's sexual and emotional commitment to them by giving them sex before marriage.

One theme that Rev. Don didn't mention that he has addressed in the past is the further erosion of marriage by the advent of the no-fault divorce. So now much of the incentive to marry has been undermined by The Pill, and then after getting married, no-fault divorce has dismantled many of the obstacles to abandoning the relationship.

DISCLAIMER: Lest anyone think I'm looking down my nose at anyone else, I'm on my third marriage, with offspring from the last two of them. I recognize and acknowledge my own failure in this area.

Then Rev. Sensing fatalistically, in my opinion, declares the battle lost, with the effect of opening the door to same-sex marriage:

Men and women living together and having sexual relations "without benefit of clergy," as the old phrasing goes, became not merely an accepted lifestyle, but the dominant lifestyle in the under-30 demographic within the past few years. Because they are able to control their reproductive abilities--that is, have sex without sex's results--the arguments against homosexual consanguinity began to wilt.

When society decided--and we have decided, this fight is over--that society would no longer decide the legitimacy of sexual relations between particular men and women, weddings became basically symbolic rather than substantive, and have come for most couples the shortcut way to make the legal compact regarding property rights, inheritance and certain other regulatory benefits. But what weddings do not do any longer is give to a man and a woman society's permission to have sex and procreate.

Apart from my semantic quibble over using "consanguinity" to describe marriage of any sort, I would disagree that the societal meaning behind marriage has disintegrated, and certainly not to the point that we, society, should redefine the term.

I certainly can't agree completely with his conclusion that "...traditionalists...need to get a clue about what has really been going on and face the fact that same-sex marriage, if it comes about, will not cause the degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it."

Marriage has been severely damaged over the past several decades, but the optimist in me refuses to believe that this is a one-way trip. The current state of marriage cries out for us to rescue it, not abandon it.