This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
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These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
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 -
Was this gender month on the Motte? Trans month? Maybe it's just what I was looking at, but it feels like there was a lot of that recently.
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.
I still 100% want to get rid of gay marriage. If I posted that on Reddit it’s auto downvoting. I’m not comfortable with people being homosexual even though I have many friends who are and basically think they should just find a chick an get on with it. And they would be happier.
Most gay even in long term relationships have a crazy amount of random sex. Well men. I don’t really understand lesbianism.
I basically think Corey Booker is going to be happier thinking about a dude while pumping cum into his wife and get a few kids then forever bachelorhood of being even a married gay man.
Most straight guys get bored with fucking their girl after a few months anyway. And it’s basically just a cute thing that makes you laugh.
I'm not sure I understand the relevance of the bottom part? I think part of the point of marriage is to guide people towards successful family formation - not just sexual pleasure, not just emotional fulfilment, but forming a genuine family unit, which is among other things capable of bringing forth and nurturing new life, but also supporting the whole rest of the society in which it exists.
It seems to me that any attempt to reduce marriage to the crudely sexual, whether that be people obsessed with gay sex or people who think it's just about guys having sex with women, are missing the point. In that sense the successful push for gay marriage was and is the outgrowth of an error going back decades.
I genuinely don't care, for instance, if a guy does not want to have sex with women. There are long and honourable traditions of both male and female virginity, and there is no shame in either. I'm interested in families, in the relational health of men and women as part of an overall vision of not only the human person but the human community also.
Now the place where the gay marriage advocate will press me is why such a vision must exclude same-sex couples, and my answer to that I think they're putting the cart before the horse. If your position is that same-sex couples ought to be able to participate in the same cultural institution that opposite-sex couples do today, then my position is that they should not do that, because opposite-sex couples shouldn't do that either. What we legally recognise as 'marriage' is not particularly worthy of the name. The problem I have with gay marriage, from a traditional/conservative position, is that it is trying to gain access to what is already a distortion of what marriage is supposed to be, and that the process by which it tries to do this is by doubling down on that distortion. Gay marriage whose core claim is "we live together, we love each other, we have sex, we want to be recognised as the same kind of thing as opposite-sex couples who do all those things" is all well and good but it is only an extension of the fundamental problem.
This is not to say that I think that if we just wound back the Sexual Revolution everything would be great, because it is clearly not that simple, and pre-Sexual-Revolution marriage was obviously also distorted in various ways. In a sense my position is that marriage must be fought for and re-created in every successive generation, from the very roots. Marriage is what you do when you and your partner set out to create something larger than yourself.
The legal regimes we have around marriage are one thing, and they may encourage the growth of real and good marriages, or they may hinder that growth, and the public policy debate is important, but they are not the foundational issue, I think. In a sense I 'support same-sex marriage' in the sense that, given the actual practice of marriage in the modern day, and what couples actually do, incorporating same-sex couples (insofar as their relational structures are imitative of opposite-sex households, which is I think pretty clearly what the big gay marriage push was claiming) into the same legal regime is just good policy. But that policy is froth on top of the ocean.
Honestly the Catholic Church should just create a new name for marriage that excludes current legal marriage. A lot of the push for legalizing gay marriage was basically a status game of getting to say their are married since marriage is high status (or was). So now the guy having sex 10 dudes a week can claim he’s married.
Should be some Latin phrase they could use to be “new marriage” which is just “old marriage”.
You already see "traditional marriage" or the even-more-unwieldy "marriage between a man and a woman" so there's clearly at least some demand.
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I'm not Catholic.
You don’t need to be. Catholics are the hot religion now in right wing circles. And the evangelicals would probably follow along if the Catholics created a new term for marriage that officially excluded same sex people.
Ah, I have just had people mistake me for Catholic before - my guess is because they're the biggest player in the 'conservative Christian intellectual' space. Mainline Protestants can be intellectual but not conservative. Evangelical Protestants can be conservative but not intellectual. So people tend to assume I'm Catholic, or automatically take Catholicism as the framework for this kind of reflection.
I actually think the rise of Catholicism in this context is overstated and mostly illusionary. In practice American Catholicism is much more like mainline Protestantism, demographically and intellectually.
At any rate, the Catholics would not create a new term - or in a sense, they already have, in the way they talk about sacramental marriage. But theologically, as it were, the Catholic position is that marriage is marriage is marriage, full stop, and there is no reason for the church to change its language just because secular law has gotten things wrong.
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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.
Even if it were overturned, I don't think it would mean anything - there is a large bipartisan majority in congress for gay marriage. I would just like to overturn it on the grounds that I think it's an indefensible reading of the Fourteenth Amendment. But then, I think that about most decisions based on the Fourteenth, which in general I think is an incredibly badly-worded amendment that has been used to justify excessive judicial overreach. It's not so much that Obergefell allows the court to declare anything it wants as that the Fourteenth Amendment itself has licensed that, even for questions which ought properly to belong to the legislature.
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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.
Nothing you wrote is untrue, but. Proceeds to gesture towards a thing in concept-space that is hard to articulate
When legalization of SSM was the topic du jour, this was more or less my position. State has invented a legal concept, let the state to do with it as it pleases and let grown-up gays to engage with that legal concept, not my business to comment on that. Everyone is free to have a different opinion about gay sex in privacy of his or her own mind, it's not like they want to gay marry Christian heterosexuals against their will. However, these days I think it was and is a line of real significance. After SSM became acknowledged as a legal right, in few years any moral teaching that disapproves of SSM was no longer a conservative position but reactionary one, one opposed to a right enshrined in law. Most people in Western societies are not principled in a way that they view legislation as a minimal viable consensus contract in a repeated negotiation game; for them, the law is a convenient Schelling point for morals, and who it is against morals? Immoral people. It is suspicious if someone has an opinion against or dares to preach publicly against a perfectly normal legal right. Many are willing to go full Judge Dredd on the people who are on the wrong side of the law.
All of it makes me uneasy. I still don't really care about SSM that much one way or another, but I notice that speaking against it first slowly, then suddenly turned into a social and professional suicide. Same applies to basic definition of words, too, like "mother" and "father". You are engaging in wrong-think if you don't enthusiastically agree that a kid can have two moms. I am worried that same thing may happen to other rights I care about.
That's been my experience. When this was a live debate, prior to 2015, there were at least fig leaf attempts to say things like, "We understand the sincerely-held convictions of people on both sides", or "You are free to believe whatever you like about marriage", or some minor concession to the idea that the issue is complicated and that people of good faith might hold to a traditional view. It wasn't always the case, and a great deal of public debate was the inevitable dumpster fire of people screaming at each other, but you did find it to an extent.
Today, the position has become that if you have reservations, you are are unforgivably bigoted, and there is no possibility of a sympathetic motive on your part.
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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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