‘Roe and Casey are overruled” was the most explosive line from the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In second place was Justice Clarence Thomas’s remark in his concurrence that the justices “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents,” explicitly those relating to contraception (Griswold), sodomy (Lawrence), and same-sex marriage (Obergefell). Quick off the mark, House Democrats — along with 47 Republicans — passed the so-called Respect for Marriage Act. The bill would repeal any “provisions that define, for purposes of federal law, marriage as between a man and a woman and spouse as a person of the opposite sex.”

Republicans saw in the bill a fearful dilemma. Same-sex marriage is popular with the American public, enjoying 70 percent support and 55 percent among Republicans, according to Gallup’s latest. On the other hand, to establish same-sex marriage through federal legislation would be to abandon social conservatives without so much as a caveat, conflating their objections to same-sex marriage with opposition to interracial marriage (statutory protection of which was inserted into the Respect for Marriage Act for this purpose). Whichever way they voted, Republicans have been notably quiet on the subject. Same-sex marriage is to the center-Right what transgenderism is becoming to the center-Left: an embarrassment and a liability.

On the left, the transgender debate concerns whether laws and policies should be based on identity or sex in cases when the two conflict. Feminists of the “trans exclusionary” variety reject the redefinition of “women” to include men, arguing that it’s a denial of reality and an affront to women’s dignity. (The increasing use of terms such as “menstruators,” “cervix havers,” “people capable of pregnancy,” and “birthing people” strengthens their case.) There has been a similar splintering of LGBTQ+ activism, since same-sex relationships are also predicated on the reality of sex. For instance, many lesbians reject the idea that men who identify as lesbians should be part of their dating pool. And many gay adults, recalling their own “gender-nonconforming youth,” are concerned by the rush to medically transition effeminate boys into girls and masculine girls into boys.

There are two arguments against enshrining transgender ideology in law. First, that transgenderism is an ontological impossibility; men can’t be women, women can’t be men, and there is no other sex. Second, that transgenderism, as a basis for public policy, is harmful. The successful pushback to transgenderism on the center-left, as seen in the United Kingdom, depends more on the pathos of the second argument than the logic of the first. Very few people today are prepared to state candidly the obvious truth that transgender women are men. Yet they can at least recognize the injustice of a male swimmer on a podium next to females, a male rapist incarcerated with female prisoners, and vulnerable adolescents having their sexual functioning and fertility impaired by transgender drugs and surgeries.

Similarly, there were (and are) two arguments against same-sex marriage. Just as the definition of “woman” is necessarily exclusive (“adult human female”), likewise the definition of “marriage” is necessarily exclusive (“one man and one woman”). And just as redefining “woman” means that something other than woman is meant by “woman,” so redefining marriage means that something other than marriage is meant by “marriage.” This argument failed to catch on (more on why shortly). The more resounding rhetorical defeat of opponents of same-sex marriage came in the debate about harms. Those opposed to the redefinition of marriage warned that society and children would be worse off because of the changes. By comparison, their opponents’ claims of harms to same-sex couples and individuals seemed more compelling and concrete. In the majority opinion of Obergefell, Justice Anthony Kennedy detailed the injustices and social alienation endured by gay Americans throughout history, identifying the exclusive definition of marriage (one man and one woman) as yet another manifestation.

Obergefell may have cut short the debate by bypassing the states. Still, feeling so rhetorically defeated, many on the right were quietly relieved to have the conversation behind them. Gay-rights lobby groups such as the Human Rights Campaign are often credited with the swift change in public perception, but the truth is they were met with surprisingly little resistance.

Same-sex marriage was only a symptom, not the cause, of a shift in belief about the nature and purpose of marriage. Before the 1960s, the idea that marriage was about children, that children do best with both a mother and a father, and that men can’t be mothers, or women fathers, was taken by most people as a given. But the sexual revolution brought about a great social unraveling as sex was divorced from reproduction and as children became little more than an afterthought in adult-centric sexual relationships. The widespread availability of contraception encouraged sex as recreation and obscured profound differences between the sexes. Before the Pill, a woman’s default answer for sex outside of commitment was “No,” while a couple’s default setting for children within marital commitment was “Yes.” Now, the reverse is true. Generally, previous generations saw pregnancy as, at best, a blessing and, at worst, a responsibility. Today, a prevailing ethic of gratitude and sacrifice has been usurped by entitlement and callousness, whereby some children are treated as commodities (as in IVF or surrogacy) or parasites (as in abortion).

As Ross Douthat has noted, “since the ’90s, approval of divorce, premarital sex, and out-of-wedlock childbearing [has] climbed steadily, and the belief that children are ‘very important’ to marriage has collapsed.” This does not seem sustainable. The fertility rate in the United States is around 1.64 children per woman, well below the replacement level of 2.1. Four in ten children are born to single mothers. The fact that gay and lesbian unions are not ordered toward children and child-rearing seems irrelevant because many heterosexual couples do not conceive of their own unions that way — nor do they want to.

No thanks to the government, there are those who have held fast to the older view of marriage, bucking every cultural trend. These social and religious conservatives who continue to marry young, without living together first, are vindicated by their marital-success rate. A recent empirical study by W. Bradford Wilcox and Lyman Stone found that religious men and women who married in their twenties without cohabiting first have “the lowest odds of divorce in America today” and that “shared faith is linked to more sexual fidelity, greater commitment and higher relationship quality.” Wilcox and Stone’s research also indicated that married couples who had cohabited before marriage were 15 percent more likely to get divorced than those who had not. Another Harvard study found that women who regularly attended church were about 40 percent less likely to divorce. Abstinence before marriage, mocked by secular society, also has its advantages, prioritizing friendship as a relationship’s foundation. Research from the Gottman Institute found that, for both husbands and wives, “the determining factor in whether they feel satisfied with sex, romance and passion in marriage is, by 70 percent, the quality of the couple’s friendship.”

Yet for all their efforts, those still invested in the original vision of marriage, those busy producing and rearing the next generation in relative contentment and stability, find themselves without political representation. Family values were once a staple of conservative politics. Now, beyond First Amendment rights, few on the right have much interest in the subject. Not coincidentally, conservatives who are apathetic about marriage have been slow to respond to transgender aggression, taking a stand against it only after realizing the issue was “winnable.”

The two competing ideals of marriage are not heterosexual marriage versus same-sex marriage, but the original view of marriage versus the revisionist one (which, again, was widely embraced long before Obergefell). In the original vision, marriage is based on the sexual complementarity of men and women and is child-centric. And the innate paternal and maternal potential of the infertile couple finds expression either in their role as adoptive parents or in the context of their extended families and communities.

As articulated in the 1950s by Fulton J. Sheen, the Catholic bishop and televangelist, this vision offered an “ever enchanting romance” in which a man and woman encounter the full mystery of each other’s sex: First is “the body-mystery” of the marital act; second, in the arrival of the first child, a husband and wife “see in each other” something they “never before knew existed,” motherhood and fatherhood; third, once children reach the age of reason, is the mystery of “fathercraft” and “mothercraft”; fourth is an appreciation of “their contribution to the well-being of the nation.” And “here, too, is the root of democracy,” he added. “For it is in the family that a person is valued not for what he is worth, nor for what he can do, but primarily for what he is.”

On a recent episode of National Review’s Editors podcast, my colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty described the newer ideal as being symbolized in an advertisement for Cialis, a drug to treat erectile dysfunction: “two adult consumers, sitting in separate bathtubs at a resort with no children, not even touching each other.” It is a sterile and luxury vision of sex, not concerned with family, even less with society, but rather with the emotional fulfillment of two close associates. Michael rightly describes this ideal as an idol, one that will “continue to exert power until it is smashed.” Yet regarding the Respect for Marriage Act, social conservatives are not asking Republicans to take a sledgehammer to the revisionist view of marriage, only that they refrain from smashing the old one.