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:
Jump in the discussion.
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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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