If I saw the title of this post somewhere on the internet I normally wouldn’t think twice about it. I’ve heard for years that couples living together before marriage are more likely to get divorced, but when I saw this was a piece in The New York Times I had to take a look. One doesn’t normally see such ideas in The New York Times. It was written by a clinical psychologist who she says is “not for or against living together,” so her view is not a moral one, but a sociological one. The social sciences over the years have been very good to traditional morality. It wasn’t always thus.

As I was growing up through the 60s, 70s, and 80s, religiously based morality didn’t get a lot of good press. Of course that’s because “the press” is pretty much dominated by progressive types, who think the morality of the Judeo-Christian traditions is regressive and positively harmful. In the days of my youth much was heard throughout American culture that the nuclear family was patriarchal; not a good thing. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, written in 1963, detailed how miserable women were being housewives and mothers. Family life was oppression, and not just for women, but children as well. The Leonardo DiCaprio-Kate Winslet movie Revolutionary Road, although set in the 1950s, captures this progressive meme well.

In Western culture, this hostility to the traditional family, and the religious morality that underpins it, goes back to the Enlightenment (and one could argue the third chapter of Genesis), but really got its start in the French Revolution. Robespierre and his gang not only wanted Liberté, égalité, fraternité, they wanted to jettison anything that had to do with traditional religious morality, and that included the family and marriage. These attitudes and ideas percolated among cultural elites for a century and a half, but didn’t trickle down to the hoi polloi until the 1960s, when then they exploded all over everyone.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the demise of the family and traditional morality; reality wouldn’t cooperate. Throughout the 80s, the disconnect between the largely secular cultural elites and regular people was growing. Theoretically divorce, for example, was a good thing; unhappy couples splitting so they could find happiness; kids are flexible. Sex without commitment was awesome, especially for guys. “Living in sin” (believe it or not this was a phrase common well into the 60s-the link is for the youngsters out there who have no idea what that means) was so judgmental; friends with benefits, don’t you know.

The cultural watershed moment when reality came crashing in was the cover story of the April 1993 Atlantic Magazine which proclaimed that “Dan Quayle was Right.” This was horrifying to our cultural masters; Dan Quayle was a Neanderthal! How could he be right about anything? And the Atlantic was no right wing rag. The Vice President had the temerity to question the portrayal of the Murphy Brown TV character having a baby out of wedlock, pointing out that having children outside of marriage is not a good thing. Of course he was ridiculed by people in the proper places, but by this time after almost 30 years of the sexual revolution reality was making itself heard. All the sociological evidence was pointing to intact, two parent families, yes, with a mother and father, as the best environment for raising emotionally and psychologically healthy children.

The evidence is so overwhelming that almost 20 years on even the most committed secular progressive has to admit families have value. Of course we’re told that families come in all shapes and sizes, and that all families have value; what might be known as the Modern Family.

Well, one day in the future even the “modern family” will prove to be not quite as good as the old fashioned one. In an astonishing about face, the 180 degree kind, those who sit on the cultural heights no longer want to get rid of marriage; they no longer denigrate it; they want to re-define it. I guess marriage is so great that it should be available to anyone that wants to have sex with someone else. I’ll put my money on reality; elements as foundational to civilization as marriage and the family are not open to redefinition.