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.
@gog:
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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.
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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