From reader Matthew Mehan, who manages to get in Aquinas, Burke, and Luke Skywalker:

Here are a few points I consider thorny regarding any prance down this primrose path of making marriage harder or stricter by making children the litmus test:
1. Federalism: Who is we? How can “we” make marriage stricter? Any attempt to do so on the federal level is a massive aggrandizement of the federal powers and merely deepens the rut of judicial tyranny by putting more family and cultural issues before the Supreme Court—a thing to be avoided. If the “we” is state communities then you may have something there, but perhaps less than we think.
2. The Western Tradition [and every old dead white guy you tend to praise in your articles: Kirk, Chesterton, Burke, More, Aquinas, Augustine, Cicero, Aristotle, et al.]: Legal culture since the Roman Republic and in speech since Aristotle and certainly in practice since well before the Magna Carta has had a fundamental premise that is ignored by almost everyone in our society except National Review and the few other beacons of conservative thought that pulse in the night of the modern era. It is a premise that makes living according to law preferable to other ways of living (tyranny, oligarchy, straight democracy and all the permutations thereof). Law is designed to recognize routinized human action that is good for man simply and in community. Ergo, marriage law is designed to support churches and synagogues by making marriage a legally beneficial arrangement (taxation, child credits, you name it). It is a mistake to think that the government’s job is to fix marriage. The government’s job is to provide for the free and supportive circumstances in which churches and communities can fix marriage. Don’t use the cold sledgehammer of government where the warm hand of lover, family, friendship, church, and community is needed. But as I said the government can aid in creating the conditions. For instance, (and my libertarian friends may cringe but we are after the same goal here), we could ban pornography. It really isn’t free speech—well maybe the articles are, but I can’t see Playboy surviving in front of the counter—it leads to promiscuity, spousal and child abuse and a host of other harmful-to-marriage behaviors. Or we can oppose entitlement programs (read prescription drugs) that sap the family of money and lead to radical independence from one’s own family, thereby weakening the bonds of family and marriage. Such tactics are far better than preempting the private institutions such as church and family by meddling with marriage itself. Conservatives, libertarians, and even Shinto-Buddhist Eastern culture-loving liberals who watch ancestor-worshipping kung-fu movies should all cringe at the notion of law dictating to marriage and family. Rather it should be the other way around. Direct meddling is a mistake. Law, for conservatives, is a reflection of healthy cultural habits, be they business practices or marriage, and not a tool to re-craft culture in our own image. Therefore, if the government redefines marriage in a way counter-intuitive to most of the private institutions concerned with marriage (e.g. family and church), then you are playing the liberal game even if you do it on the state level. Think of Luke Skywalker before the Emperor: “Take your weapon, strike me down with it, and your journey to the Dark Side will BE COMPLETE! Or Legolas: “But you cannot wield the ring, no one can.”
3. Practical concerns: Let’s face it. You can’t make children the requirement for marriage because of in vitro fertilization and lesbians. If you propose such a policy there will suddenly be thousands of lesbians who, having all quickly agreed in chat rooms beforehand, have “always wanted to have a child but now feel they can’t because of that awful (and arbitrary) new marriage law. We have to win the moral arguments on this one or we lose all the policy ones.