Here (emphases mine):
[T]he church understands marriage to be a sacrament, a gift of God’s grace for the transformation of the recipients. Look for a moment at two examples: baptism and eucharist. The first moves us into relationship with Christ and his church, while the second gives us the life of Christ so we can become more like him. Marriage is the same way. The endgame is union with God as we grow in Christ. ... Our marriages have the power to transform us into the likeness of Christ. ...
Marriage is now primarily a relationship for the betterment and self-fulfillment of two individuals. Two are stronger than one, after all. Together two individuals can better gratify each other’s desires and fulfill each others needs—right up until the moment they no longer seem able or willing, of course.
None of that is false, so far as it goes.
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You will search the essay in vain for the words "baby" or "children" or "reproduction", the essential object of marriage.
It's as if a "proper" view of marriage never existed in the whole history of all humanity before the followers of a crazed Pharisee called marriage a mystery of Christ and the church in the epistle to the Ephesians.
The tyranny of that one line is the culprit behind the distortion of the immemorial view of marriage as humankind's divinely ordained outlet for expressing God's creativity through the family. The idealizing conception of marriage as spiritually transformative has exposed marriage to all the worst elements of an unattainable mysticism which has bred the contempt for the institution which now plagues the West. Instead of ordering our culture around marriage and children and family we have done everything to delay, deny and redefine what nature and nature's God demands. And then we complain when we lose control of our politics.
Maybe if we had done what God has always commanded we wouldn't now be alone and ashamed as a tiny army of homosexual enemies invades our gates and routs us.
"How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them;
They will not be ashamed
When they speak with their enemies in the gate."
-- Psalm 127:5
