New York Times columnist David Brooks has warned religious conservatives that they will continue fighting the sexual revolution at the risk of alienating future generations of Americans. Far better, he advises, would be to define a rich faith like Christianity not solely by its opposition to harmless sexual behavior, but by doubling down on its “good works” traditions to win back lost hearts and minds.

However, instead of doing that, religious conservatives are already looking for ways to flout the Supreme Court ruling. Since Justice Kennedy ruled that states can’t selectively withhold marriage licenses from gay couples without running afoul of the 14th Amendment’s equal treatment injunction, Sen. Rand Paul, the libertarian-leaning Republican presidential aspirant from Kentucky, is calling on them to simply get out of the marriage business. What’s more, Texas and Mississippi are heeding his call and have announced they might stop issuing marriage licenses altogether.

Privatizing marriage is a long-standing libertarian idea whose whole purpose was to foster John Stuart Mill’s “thousand experiments in living.” Pulling it out now to deny gays an opportunity to get married — in a sense, keeping alive discrimination by privatizing it — will not just pervert the idea but also discredit it, just as the bedrock libertarian principle of voluntary association became suspect when it was invoked by racists during the Civil Rights struggle to legitimize private discrimination against blacks.