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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   28892 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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Not only did the bad things social conservatives predicted about gay marriage come to pass, a lot of the stuff social conservatives were jeered at (truly or falsely) for predicting about gay marriage came to pass. The gay marriage pie chart meme is over 15 years old now; since then the terrorists won in Afghanistan, schools have been teaching kids how to have gay sex, various plagues (monkeypox, COVID) have erupted (though no locusts or frogs), and we've got a war in Ukraine (OK this is weak sauce because the meme specified WWIII).

I suppose I should also mention positive predictions that failed to come true as well - I remember plenty of pieces along the lines of "gay marriage will rejuvenate and improve straight marriage", with the idea that extending it would contribute to the wide social valuation of marriage. This will improve reverence for marriage and help everyone.

That... did not happen, and in fact, taking the US as the biggest example, marriage rates have continued to decline, while average age at marriage has continued to increase. The benefit never manifested.

None of this necessarily proves that the conservatives are right, and you can be progressive while just holding that all of this is unrelated and that gay marriage needs no more justification than "it would make some gay people happy so why not?", but I do think that, at the least, it's a good reason to re-evaluate some of those old arguments, and maybe conclude that people against it at the time were not wrong about everything.

Extending the right of civil marriage as a contract to the gays was something that I would have been tepid about and not really minded (until the idiots running the pro-same sex marriage campaign in my country couldn't successfully hide their contempt for normal mores and enraged me to red-hot "I'm voting no in the referendum, I know we're gonna lose but to hell with it, I am not going along with this crap"), but it was ridiculous to say that changing the definition of marriage would not have any effects whatsoever. If we changed the age of consent to be six, I don't think anyone would get away with "now it's legal to fuck six year olds but this will have no effect on wider society whatsoever".

Same way that the number of abortions has gone up in my country once it was legalised. Gosh, you don't say? Making something legal means more of it happens? Who could possibly have foreseen that? Oh, and this is despite the rollout of free contraception and nope, it's not all "pregnant by incestuous rape and I will die unless I get an abortion because I'm only ten" cases:

The number of women having abortions in Ireland rose significantly last year to 10,852, the highest on record since the law changed.

This compares to 8,156 terminations of pregnancy carried out here in 2022 under the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018.

The majority, 10,711, were early medical abortions, where a woman takes two types of tablet prescribed by a GP up to 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Another 108 terminations were due to a diagnosed fatal foetal abnormality where there was a condition likely to lead to death of the foetus.

A further 24 pregnancies were terminated due to risk to the life or health of the mother, while another nine involved an emergency intervention.

...Asked to comment on the overall number of terminations for last year, Dr Shirley McQuade, medical director of the Well Woman Centre, said she was surprised at the high number.

She said while the population has increased and would account for some of the rise, there are likely to be other factors also behind the increase.

She pointed out that free contraception is now available to women aged 17 to 35 years of age, which should make it easier to control fertility.

“The options are out there for women to use. Obviously there is a failure rate in contraception, but it is quite low,” she said.

“There may be women who are on a form of contraception that is not suiting them or they are forgetting to take it. There are women who avoid taking any form of contraception, but are not joining the dots.

“If they are sexually active and not using contraception, the likelihood is they are going to get pregnant.”

So if we add up all the "thousands of women will die unless we get legal abortion!" cases by these figures, that's a whole 108 +24 +9 = 141. Out of 10,852 that comes to... 1.3%. Well I'm so glad compassion and trusting the medical experts won the abortion battle now.

At this stage I'm singing the same old song, but here goes: clears throat But I was told and assured by the government bringing this in that abortion would be limited and would only be for very severe cases of medical necessity! There would be no abortions because "whoops, I got laid and now there's a bun in the oven and I'm not ready for that"! (No, I did not believe any of that so the latest results don't surprise me).

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