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Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of February 2, 2026
Contributions for the week of February 9, 2026
@clo:
Natalism & Co.
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Notes -
I think trans issues have largely, albeit by no means completely, supplanted homosexuality issues in the culture war meta as compared with, say, 20 years ago. And this is one of the few online spaces that enforces neither a trans-advocacy orthodoxy nor a trans-critical orthodoxy, so it's a pretty perennially popular topic here.
It is a continuing source of interest to me just how much gay issues have won completely. I still have plenty of reservations, and you can still find a handful of cranky religious conservatives saying "now it's time to overturn Obergefell", but the right as a whole just seem to have stopped caring, and in fact "trans is bad because it endangers gays" has become a sometimes run into there.
The defining social issue of the time when I was growing up has been completely abandoned.
Depending on death luck, it's quite likely that R appointed justices will dominate on the SCOTUS for the foreseeable future. Obergefell is a moral smorgasbord that essentially allows the SCOTUS to write whatever they want into the constitution. It's not going anywhere.
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To an extent, gay issues like "don't criminalize sodomy" and "gay marriage is legally defined" have won, but that's just as much due to sweeping changes in straight culture as a gay cultural victory. "Sodomy" is typically defined as both anal or oral sex, and anal sex has become aspirational in more prurient strands of straight culture, while oral sex (both ways) is exceptionally normalized to the point where I wouldn't doubt that it's more common than intercourse. Whenever our Irish friend comes out confused by the frequency of oral sex in younger generations, I have to chuckle a bit to myself. If only she knew how frequently young women demand oral sex from their partners as a feminist issue, or realized how often popular culture depicts men who don't do it well as unmanly...
It's also pretty... cheap to talk about the "sanctity of marriage" after the massive divorce-fest of the past 40 years and resulting social chaos. Young people are starting to view marriage as a legal headache rather than a social benefit, and cohabitation is skyrocketing massively. "Let's let the gays participate in the meaningless ritual that nobody takes seriously and just causes legal headaches" is incresingly the view of the young left on the issue, and most of the arguments against it stand out to the center as hypocritical.
Civil marriage hasn't even approximated the Christian view of marriage in a long time, to the extent I think it's a different institution. SSM just stands out to me as the final nail in a coffin, not a grand transgression of how sanctified marriage is in a world where the Republican president is on his third model wife after divorce. My impression is that this is generally the view of the young right, even among Christians.
That said, a decent chunk of social opprobrium continues to exist in the center, particularly oriented towards the promiscuous behavior of gay men. In a way, even out gay men understand they have to keep their full sexuality in the closet and put a face on Shoggoth. Straight men keep a respectful distance, and straight women maintain friendly relations by make-believing in their head that gay men are universally sensitive, passionate, artistic, sweet and pure love boys like in yaoi who just need a wishing well. The actual destructive elements of gay culture are rarely acknowledged except inside the LGBT umbrella, and even then usually aren't aired to outsiders for solidarity reasons.
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I think that's true, but I think with a giant asterisk.
On the one hand, I do think a lot of conservatives have just flatly given up on the idea that they can contest the morality and "normalness" of gayness in a shared public square and have any hope of winning that argument for, again, some shared American political consensus, at least in the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, I have definitely gotten the impression that, for a very big subset of more traditional Christians specifically, this recognition has mostly made them read the sign of the times and recognize that broader America is overtly hostile to their values, worldviews, and especially the moral formation of their children, and that a kind of internal divorce is necessary - their immediate future, as they relate to the broader American culture, is more like the Jews in captivity in Babylon. That mindset is... not what it looks like to make peace with the new social norms. Instead, it is, I guess, exit and schism instead of voice and support.
I've recently read Aaron Renn's "Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture", Jonathan Rauch's "Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy", reread George Marsden's "The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief" (specifically the last chapter of that book about pillarization), and am now reading George Yancey's "One Faith No Longer: The Transformation of Christianity in Red and Blue America", and lurking in the background of all those works is the complexities of this split; it's hard to see how, exactly, more traditional Christians can actual participate in a shared consensus whose moral self-justification hinges, at least in part, on the public moral progress that comes with confining traditional Christian sexual ethics to dustbin of history and then social raising the bloody flag, so to speak, about that victory as a constant reminder of public moral legitimacy.
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