Let me see if I get this anti-gay thing

Yglesias flags an excerpt from this post by conservative blogger Rod Dreher, which purports to explain why conservatives don't approve of gay-ness:

If homosexuality is legitimized -- as distinct from being tolerated, which I generally support -- then it represents the culmination of the sexual revolution, the goal of which was to make individual desire the sole legitimate arbiter in defining sexual truth. It is to lock in, and, on a legal front, to codify, a purely contractual, nihilistic view of human sexuality.

At first, I didn't understand what this meant. "Sexual truth"? What does that even mean? Isn't the "truth" that gay people are gay, and that's that? And why is legitimizing individual desire "nihilistic" - isn't the whole idea of the "pursuit of happiness" central to the philosophy of natural rights?

Then I started to guess what Dreher meant. He's talking about transitioning from a society in which sex is public to one in which sex is private. In Dreher's ideal(ized) past society, the community had a say in who you had sex with and when and how; after the sexual revolution, you and you alone get to determine your sex life. "Truth" as Dreher defines it here means "acceptability".

And, looking through Dreher's longish rant, I find that I've guessed right:

We live in a highly eroticized culture, in which the gift of human sexuality is debased as a way to merchandise products, and the false promise of sexual "liberation" serves as an affront to human dignity. I know this. I've lived it. People who don't grasp the power of sex to wreck lives and disassemble a tolerable social order simply aren't paying attention. You want to see what happens when the only rule guiding people's sexual behavior is their own desire? Check out inner-city America. You don't have to be a religious conservative, or any kind of conservative at all, to observe that a permissive sexual ethic is terrible for society, especially for the poor, and for girls.

Dreher doesn't know economics-ese, but he is basically saying that sex has externalities. People having sex in the wrong way causes problems for others, he claims; therefore, our society should regulate the sexual behavior of individuals just as we reglate businesses that pollute the environment. Even in a country that respects the pursuit of happiness, you aren't allowed to pursue happiness by dumping cyanide in the river; Dreher thinks having the wrong kind of sex is equivalent to dumping cyanide in the river of society.

Is he right? I think he is right that certain kinds of sexual behavior - deadbeat dad-hood, for instance - hurt third parties (e.g. the kids). But I think there's an enforcement problem here; historically, every government that has tried to intrusively regulate family behavior has failed miserably, usually wrecking society in the process. That includes state-sponsored religions.

And I also disagree with Dreher that homosexuality carries any kind of negative externality. A kid who has a deadeat dad probably suffers; a kid who has two dads doesn't suffer any more than a kid with a dad and a mom. Dreher opposes homosexuality because it's a symbol of the privatization of sex, but someone should tell him that that ship sailed long ago.

Dreher and his ilk are just going to have to accept that no power on Earth can regulate sexual behavior by force (and God help us if that ever changes!). He and other religious conservatives are going to have to learn to live in a world where religions and governments can only persuade individuals to change their sexual habits. Natural rights have won this round.