But with apologies, the marriage fights didn’t begin in 2003.

Between roughly 1960 and 1980, marriage came under a rather fierce and multi-faced ideological attack.

Five great strands of contemporary liberalism — the sexual revolution, the gender-role revolution, the expansion of welfare for the poor, the movement for racial equality, and the environmental movement — came together to support de-norming of marriage, knocking it off its pedestal and de-legitimating, in various ways, its privileged cultural postion.

Why? The monologue ran something like this: Moral norms disapproving of illegitimacy must be overturned to make room for expanded financial supports for poor single mothers; concern for married childbearing was implicitly and sometimes explicitly racist; marriage trapped women into unfulfilling domestic roles and interfered with the sexual pleasure that should be available equally to men and women. The fear of the slut within must be conquered. Abortion must be elevated to a constitutional right or women cannot be just like men in bed or in the workplace. And the population explosion reinforced the sexual revolutionaries’ idea that the generative capacity of women — our power to create new life — was a problem, not an asset.

And roughly between 1960 and 1980, the divorce rate and the out-of-wedlock birth rates tripled. (I do not say this was cause and effect, I simply note that both things happened at roughly the same time in mutually reinforcing ways).

Pause: What did I learn during this era from personal experience, my first 20 years?

I learned that if women have sex for long periods outside of marriage they are quite likely to get pregnant at least once. I saw how this big, obvious truth was repressed in culturally privileged speech, where highly credentialed people repeated as a mantra: We have separated sex from reproduction. Meanwhile, the girls around me kept getting pregnant. I saw that without abortion as a backup, that truth would be obvious even to Yale girls and the boyfriends and fathers and professors of Yale girls.

Women are people who, when we have sex, sometimes create new life. This truth deeply colors relations between men and women — even men and women who never have children together, indeed, men and women who never have sex together. Men impregnate, women are not impregnable. A society which tries to deny these facts ends up doing great and lasting damage to its own children, and to both men and women.

I learned the key indicator of contraceptive success was not technological efficacy but motivation of the user. Only women highly motivated to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy stand a chance of avoiding pregnancy by any of the conceivable methods.

Marriage as a legal institution and as social ideal, I came to perceive, was regulating the sexual behavior of the unmarried as well. (e.g. avoiding unmarried pregnancy becomes especially challenging if it’s hard to figure out whether or not you are married, or if you and your partner have differing views on this important question, as often happens with cohabiting couples).

Moreover, I came to understand in an immediate, personal way that the happy talk of the cultural elites around the visible decline in marriage was not (as they liked to tell themselves) rooted in science; it amounted to a new sexual taboo — a polite way of avoiding big, obvious truths by covering them up with pretty-sounding words. A society in which marriage was weakened was not simply a society where women had more freedom. It was a society in which women were more vulnerable and millions of babies are less protected.

I learned this truth: Connecting sex, babies, love, money, and mothers and fathers is hard.

Hard at the individual level, and hard at the societal level. A society where marriage is the normal, usual, and generally reliable way to raise children is a great cultural achievement, not a law of nature.

Why, then, is marriage a universal human social institution? Because, over time, cultures that do not find a way to some minimal version of this achievement die out and are replaced by cultures that do. I saw as well that our own culture’s task of building an effective marriage culture is greatly complicated — and also ennobled — by our essential commitment to the equal worth and dignity of every human being. Many, many cultures resolve problems created by babies by being concerned only about protecting marital and/or wanted children. Non-marital children are disposable, often literally left to die.

I learned: When marriage is privatized, women and children get hurt.

(This, as Jennifer Roback Morse recently pointed out, is the central flaw in the “get government out of marriage” solution to our culture wars.) (To be continued. . .)