Today the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether there exists a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, with a conclusion that (notwithstanding some chin-stroking from Anthony Kennedy this morning) seems more or less foregone. Among my fellow journalists and commentators, there’s little remaining debate at all, in part because there’s almost nobody left to have one, and in part because the winning side’s theory of the case (that opposition equals bigotry) precludes sustained engagement with the few remaining non-converts to its cause. On this issue, social conservatives have basically experienced the old “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” process in reverse, and we’re somewhere between the “laugh at you” and the “ignore you” stages — though it remains to be seen whether “then they fine you and tax you and try to shut you down” will be the actual final step.

For a good example of the laughter, I recommend this piece by MSNBC’s Irin Carmon, running under the title “The Wildest Arguments Against Marriage Equality,” which quotes from some of various briefs filed on behalf of the traditional definition of wedlock. Some of the arguments she cites really are strange, implausible, prejudiced or dumb; a few of them are attached to predictions too specific or sweeping to be credible. What’s striking to me, though, is how many are just variants on a claim that social conservatives have been making for years and years and years, which I think can be usefully summarized as follows: What a society believes and teaches about the link between sex, marriage and procreation has major implications for how, when and whether people couple, marry and raise children, which in turn has implications for every other societal arrangement as well.

I’m not sure if most liberals, or most same-sex marriage supporters, would call this broad claim “wild” per se. The eye-rolling only really enters in when social conservatives get specific about how they think it cashes out — with lower marriage rates, more unstable families, more children born out of wedlock, more commodification of reproduction, fewer children born overall, etc. the further we move away from the idea of marriage as something essentially linked to conjugality, sexual difference, and procreation. Eye-rolling isn’t the only response, of course: There is a lot of honest left-right disagreement about whether some of these trends are necessarily troubling at all, or whether they involve trade-offs (for the sake of female equality, in particular) that are just morally necessary to make. But both among those (like Carmon, I think) who believe changing family structures might be a net positive in the end and among those inclined to think that the decline of the two-parent family is regrettable and even tragic, there’s a shared dismissal-with-prejudice (or, again, with laughter) of the strong link that social conservatives assert exists between the model of marriage that a society instantiates and how people actually behave.

Which is understandable, since the modern liberal mind is trained to ask for spreadsheet-ready projections and clearly defined harms, and the links that social conservatives think exist aren’t amenable to that kind of precise measurement or definition. How do you run a regression analysis on a culture’s marital iconography? How do you trace the downstream influence of a change in that iconography on future generations’ values and ideas and choices? How do you measure highly-diffuse potential harms from some cultural shift, let alone compare them to the concrete benefits being delivered by the proposed alteration? How do you quantify, assess and predict the influence of a public philosophy of marriage — whatever that even means — on manners and morals and behavior? Especially when there are so many confounding socioeconomic variables involved — enough of them, in fact, to enable left and right to argue endlessly about whether something as nebulous as “culture” really shapes marriage and family at all, or whether everything is just economics all the way down.

These are just the intellectual biases of our age, no better whined at than withstood. And in the case of same-sex marriage, where the debate played out the way it did in part because ideas about sex and marriage had already changed so much for straight people, the demand that skeptics identify clear harms arguably has a stronger-than-usual logic: Since most serious social conservatives concede that same-sex marriage follows from premises about wedlock that our society has already partially adopted, it’s reasonable to ask why this change alone should be resisted, and why we should expect it to have any meaningful negative effects on heterosexual life beyond what earlier changes already ushered in. And the answer might be that we shouldn’t. As I’ve suggested before, the march of same-sex marriage could be both a natural legal completion of the sexual revolution and an accelerant of its cultural consequences. However, it’s also possible that it’s just a capstone on a new sexual/marital order that’s now relatively predictable in its social consequences, and so we shouldn’t expect much in the way of follow-on effects.

But with all that being said, there is something strange, even deeply strange, about a discussion of social and legal change in which it’s never acknowledged that for all the hard-to-quantify elements in their vision, social conservatives do have a pretty decent predictive track record, including in many cases where their fears were dismissed as wild and apocalyptic, their projections as sky-is-falling nonsense, their theories of how society and human nature works as evidence-free fantasies.

It’s not that social conservatives are always right about where American society is going. As you would expect, they often err on the side of pessimism: The “Slouching Toward Gomorrah” fears that informed some right-wing arguments in my youth, for instance, were partially falsified by subsequent declines in crime, abortion rates and teen pregnancy, and it’s easy enough to reach back into the history books to find moral panics that turned out to be just that. And there are plenty of slippery-slope arguments, even when vindicated, that don’t necessarily prove anything on the merits: The fact that Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Lawrence v. Texas was basically correct about that ruling’s implication, for instance, is a point that same-sex marriage’s supporters have actively (and understandably) embraced in the recent years.

But there’s still a broad track record that’s worth considering. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the pro-choice side of the abortion debate frequently predicted that legal abortion would reduce single parenthood and make marriages more stable, while the pro-life side made the allegedly-counterintuitive claim that it would have roughly the opposite effect; overall, it’s fair to say that post-Roe trends were considerably kinder to Roe’s critics than to the “every child a wanted child” conceit. Conservatives (and not only conservatives) also made various “dystopian” predictions about eugenics and the commodification of human life as reproductive science advanced in the ’70s, while many liberals argued that these fears were overblown; today, from “selective reduction” to the culling of Down’s Syndrome fetuses to worldwide trends in sex-selective abortion, from our fertility industry’s “embryo glut” to the global market in paid surrogacy, the dystopian predictions are basically just the status quo. No-fault divorce was pitched as an escape hatch for the miserable and desperate that wouldn’t affect the average marriage, but of course divorce turned out to have social-contagion effects as well. Religious fears that population control would turn coercive and tyrannical were scoffed at and then vindicated. Dan Quayle was laughed at until the data suggested that basically he had it right. The fairly-ancient conservative premise that social permissiveness is better for the rich than for the poor persistently bemuses the left; it also persistently describes reality. And if you dropped some of the documentation from today’s college rape crisis through a wormhole into the 1960s-era debates over shifting to coed living arrangements on campuses, I’m pretty sure that even many of the conservatives in that era would assume that someone was pranking them, that even in their worst fears it couldn’t possibly end up like this.

More broadly, over the last few decades social conservatives have frequently offered “both/and” cultural analyses that liberals have found strange or incredible — arguing (as noted above) that a sexually-permissive society can easily end up with a high abortion rate and a high out-of-wedlock birthrate; or that permissive societies can end up with more births to single parents and fewer births (not only fewer than replacement, but fewer than women actually desire) overall; or that expressive individualism could lead to fewer marriages and greater unhappiness for people who do get hitched. Social liberals, on the other hand, have tended to take a view of human nature that’s a little more positivist and consumerist, in which the assumption is that some kind of “perfectly-liberated decision making” is possible and that such liberation leads to optimal outcomes overall. Hence that 1970s-era assumption that unrestricted abortion would be good for children’s family situations, hence the persistent assumption that marriages must be happier when there’s more sexual experimentation beforehand, etc.

I’m not going to tell you that either side has a monopoly on the truth; human nature is much too complicated for that. But I will say, again, that if you look at the post-1960s trend data — whether it’s on family structure and social capital, fertility and marriage rates, patterns of sexual behavior and their links to flourishing relationships, or just trends in marital contentment and personal happiness more generally — the basic social conservative analysis has turned out to have more predictive power than my rigorously empirical liberal friends are inclined to admit.

All this may tell us exactly nothing about the implications of same-sex marriage. History rarely repeats itself exactly, and a worldview can be prophetic on several points and all wrong on another. Moreover, the conservatives (and conservative-friendly liberals) who might agree with some of the above but also think that same-sex marriage is itself basically bourgeois, not revolutionary, may be vindicated in a way that the people who made a “conservative case for abortion” (a half-forgotten but substantial bunch) in the 1970s mostly were not. Religious conservatives have reasons to be doubtful on this point, but the future is unwritten, and we see through a glass darkly in interpreting what this particular change will ultimately mean.

But while we wait for its official ratification, the likely victors should just remember that what’s “wild,” whether in analysis or in prophecy, is not necessarily wrong.