I don't really mean to take issue with any other part of that article, but this is certainly wrong: Far from Santorum's view of Christianity as timelessly emphasizing procreation through marriage, research by scholars like Duke University's Elizabeth Clark has shown that Christians of the first to fifth centuries, to the contrary, believed that the renunciation of family, home, marriage, reproduction, and property was the highest ideal. With ingenious arguments and astute Scriptural interpretation, they fervently argued the "anti-marriage" line. So much for the Christian tradition having enshrined procreative marriage timelessly "as God made it to be". Devaluing marriage and family life in favor of celibacy as a spiritual ideal has not much to do with the practice of marriage as it did exist among Christians of the time. Late Antique Christians still believed God had created and ordained natural procreative family arrangements, even if they thought the natural could be surpassed by the supernatural. She does make the more relevant point below -- that Church control over marriage developed over many centuries. Rick Santorum is ignorant, and his claim ("the beginning of time!") is too general, but actually, there is little to contradict his statement if limited to the history of marriage in Christianty (which the author claims to do). Santorum didn't say anything about marriage as a sacrament or even as a legal institution, although I'd guess the latter is implied. There was concubinage, practiced by the Romans and the Franks (and possibly others), but even that (though condemned as a sin) is not seen as a rival to legal marriage. Of course, history shows that marriage has changed in many ways throughout the centuries of Christian society. But "one man, one woman, for procreation" basically did not change. For many people it was seen as the bottom of the ladder in terms of your state of life. But that doesn't mean it was all that malleable.