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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5978 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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firstly an injustice, and secondly itself a mere pretense, an attempt to ignore the biological fact of parentage while fantasising a similar role for the same-sex partner

This would be a salient argument if the only children not raised by their biological parents were either orphans or adopted by gay people.

But reality is different. Gay marriage did not destroy marriage, instead marriage was destroyed long before that. People marry, have kids, then divorce. Or just get pregnant outside of committed relationships. Parents have their kids taken away because they are terrible parents.

Now, you could institute a regime where these cases were avoided. Perhaps you make abortion mandatory for any pregnancy where the parents are unable to prove that they will stay together with a probability higher than 0.95. Or you just extract gametes from everyone after puberty and then sterilize them, and rely on IVF for couples after they convince an expert panel that they will make great parents. Or you just make people require such an expert panel for marriage and make PIV sex outside marriage illegal.

So far, I have not seen any conservatives arguing for any of that. Your 'injustice' lives in every single parent family, and your 'pretense' in any patchwork family. In fact, the pro-lifers are actively creating more of that -- nobody believes that a crack addicted prostitute who got pregnant will become clean and form a happy fairy tale family with her former client just because you force here to have the child.

The imperfect is not the opposite of the good. It’s the imperfect of good. You do not choose evil (which children like Buttigieg is evil) because the world is imperfect.

And it’s the same thing with gay marriage. Because you can find bad marriages does not mean you just get rid of marriage which gay marriage essentially did. You work to improve marriage.

I feel like your arguments boil down to some people starve therefore all people should starve.

For what it's worth, I was describing a position, not advocating one myself.

Personally I agree entirely with the conclusion that marriage was destroyed or degraded long before this particular issue emerged. I am not therefore sympathetic to same-sex marriage, though I note in that linked post that it's probably 'good policy', but I do think that the argument about SSM specifically is missing the deeper point.

From the comments of "The Argument from Cultural Evolution":

People objected to no-fault divorce, and were dismissed as religious fundamentalists who wanted to chain people in loveless marriages. People objected to contraception, and were dismissed as sex-hating Puritans and papists who wanted to suppress healthy, loving sexuality. Slippery slopes were invoked in both cases, but no one paid attention.

It doesn’t matter which hill you choose to die on, you still get called a bigot, and you still die.

And from "Beware Systemic Change":

The strongest conservative case against gay marriage is that it reinforces a centuries-long redefinition of marriage from a strategic partnership focused on child-rearing to a ceremonial acknowledgment of romantic infatuation, potentially leading to a deep shift in the way people think about issues like who to marry, when to have kids, when to get divorced, and how to treat their family. That argument hasn’t been rigorously evaluated by statisticians and found wanting. It’s been found annoying and left untouched.

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