We social conservatives have spent a big part of the past two decades talking about homosexuality and its role in public life, particular when it comes to marriage. That isn’t an entirely unimportant question but, in the context of what has happened to marriage since the 1960s and the overall state of our sexual culture, it is a relatively trivial one. It seems to me that very often talking about homosexuality has mainly been a way of not talking about other things that need talking about.

The things that have gone along with our retreat from what historically would have been understood as marriage into what we have now — that tepid and deformed legal construct that pretends to be a substitute for the real thing — are not the cause of that separation. They are only correlates. It was not the invention of the birth-control pill, or the adoption of no-fault divorce, that hollowed out marriage: It was that we became the sort of people who desired those things. We became — Western civilization became — the kids who flunked the test in the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment, unable to resist immediate gratification and, having stripped ourselves of the cultural basis for understanding the distinction, unable to tell the difference between pleasure and happiness.

Hence the sex dolls.