Life & Wisdom Quote by Ferdinand Mount

Mount’s sly “of course” does a lot of work: it cordons off sex as the one human constant nobody can seriously deny, then pivots to a claim that feels provocative mainly because it’s so calmly delivered. The sentence structure is a little trap. By starting with biological inevitability (“have existed, exist, and will exist”), he invites the reader into the comfortable logic of nature. Then he snaps the tether: inevitability doesn’t equal justification. Sex isn’t evidence for the family; it’s just evidence for sex.

The intent is to deflate a familiar conservative syllogism that treats the nuclear family as the natural, necessary container for sexuality and reproduction. Mount’s phrasing refuses the moral halo. “Indispensability” is bureaucratically cold, almost mock-legal, and that’s the point: he’s dragging a sanctified institution into the realm of practical argument. If you want to defend “the family,” you don’t get to smuggle it in under the banner of biology.

Subtextually, he’s also widening the frame beyond heterosexual marriage without grandstanding. If sexual relations persist regardless, then the social question becomes: what arrangements best distribute care, stability, and responsibility? The family may be valuable, but it’s not self-evidently indispensable - and certainly not because people keep having sex.

Context matters: as a late-20th/early-21st century British writer, Mount is speaking into decades of culture-war rhetoric about divorce, contraception, single parenthood, and LGBTQ rights. The line reads like an antidote to panic: society doesn’t collapse when sexuality detaches from one sanctioned form; it forces us to justify institutions on outcomes, not mythology.