Seen on Twitter:

This guy is suffering from a very bad case of epistemic closure twitter.com/normative/stat…

— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) April 1, 2013

"Epistemic closure" is when you never talk to anyone who doesn't think like you, so you're unfamiliar with their arguments. (Like John Podhoretz, who had never heard that immigration restrictionists wanted to limit legal immigration.)

Bizarro thing about @douthatnyt's column is that this "marriage is all about procreation" meme had zero cultural footprint before SSM debate

— Julian Sanchez (@normative) March 31, 2013

Of course, every marriage ceremony in every Anglican/Episcopalian church since 1662 has included this line explaining what marriage was about:

"First, It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name..."

The Catholic marriage ceremony has much the same thing, but in different language. One can only assume this guy has never been to normal wedding. It's like what Tom Wolfe said about the "Great Relearning" in the Sixties. In San Francisco during the hippie era, doctors were treating diseases that had vanished before they were born:

diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.

The hippies had decided that personal hygiene was a bourgeois fetish, and were reaping the consequences.

That's what happens when you try to start from the Year Zero and forget what everything your grandparents knew.

UPDATE: I should have pointed out that the same thing applies to the Jewish wedding ceremony, of course, and it's John Podhoretz, of all people, who is pointing it out to Sanchez on Twitter. He also makes the obvious point that there was really no such thing as non-procreative marriage before the advent of birth control.