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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24837 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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Two relevant comments from 2014 on a social conservative blog I used to visit:

It was clear from the beginning that this was never about legal equality, per se (although that was an important part of it), but rather about social equality – that is, forcing everyone to treat same sex couplings the same way they do opposite sex couplings, under penalty of severe social sanction if they do not do so.

There is a template for this – the template that was used for race, and the template that was used for sex. It’s just being applied in a new context, but the template is the same, and that’s why it will work. It has a track record of working, after all. In 20 years, if not sooner, these kinds of discussions will be viewed the same way as discussions about race that took place in the 1950s-70s – anachronistic, bigoted, and something worthy of eye-rolls and headshakes.

They’ve won, folks. On this issue, they have won – it’s going to be treated like being an open racist or an open sexist – in other words, severe social and professional sanction, all unofficial of course, but powerful all the same. It will have the effect of stamping it out. Just like with cigarettes. It’s the way we do things here – slap a scarlet letter on it, and stamp it out through social sanction.

We will be permitted to have dissenting views, but only privately – as in, not expressing them in public, not outside of our homes, not outside of our churches. Not in the professional sphere, nor the political sphere, nor the extended social sphere. Over time, this will lead to the ideas dying out, slowly, over time, other than for a committed radical core. Which will be seen as being radical and fringe.

Of course, that’s not a call for surrender. They have won for the time being, but no merely human victory is ever eternal. Their star will wane eventually, and we must be ready when it does. But for now, it’s a time to consolidate, to reflect on what went so badly wrong, and to protect to the extent that we can without making ourselves martyrs needlessly.

There will be a "virtual gulag" in which dissidents are excluded from society. They lose their jobs and can't find any work other than subsistence work, if that. They are excluded from churches and places of worship. They will be banned from public accommodations such as restaurants and hotels; banned from doing business or purchasing goods and services. It won't be official. It will just be that word gets around about who the dissidents are, and no one will do business with or socialize with them at all. They will starve to death, literally, in plain sight.

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