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.