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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   21846 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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I'm skeptical that there's a single story that hits all of these categories, without being so broad as to be useless. That said...

how exactly did gay marriage ... become the default?

There are three competing narratives, here:

  • Mistake theory. In this model, the median person who opposed gay marriage or homosexuality before 2000 had a bad model of what that meant. Over time, increased exposure, through the internet, the media representation, and especially through people discovering people in their own lives were gay, corrected those mistakes - not making two men kissing each other more interesting, but enough that it wasn't alien, just Those Weirdos Doing That Weird Thing. In some, this just made their discomfort a lower-priority matter; in others, it showed them people who would have direct benefit from the change in policy and who they wanted to benefit.
  • The Deluge. In this model, the gay rights movement had spent thirty-plus years building political infrastructure, and it hit a turning point and was able to overcome other external forces that prevented that force from being used. Some of those changes were legal (reduced mail censorship, cable media and internet avoiding broadcast censorship), some were social (actors coming out, cheaper transportation, easier small publication efforts), and some were both (there was a national movement for school teachers to come out, focused around teacher's union and their ability to fight firings). This force was brought to persuade or replace leadership, which brought changes to policy, and then people agreed with whatever became the new normal.
  • The Crush. In this model, the gay rights movement was able to bring the weight of institutions down, hard, on anyone who disagreed, with any and all tools available. This both made disagreeing more difficult, but more critically also removed the actual disagreements from public space, such that by Obergefell no one in Blue Tribe spaces (and even many people in Red Tribe spaces!) hadn't heard the full form of any strong policy arguments in the better part of a decade.

The real answer is a mix of all three (and probably one feeding into another), but the proportions matter. I hope for the mistake theory, but the more cynical I'm feeling the more The Crush seems plausible - not helped by the extreme unwillingness of anyone serious to engage with the possibility, even to recognize its failure in the trans stuff.

I think your explanations are missing a driver of why these trends started happening. (I also think you are underemphasizing the greater difficulty of being opposed to gay marriage when one has gay friends or family, though I am not so ambitious as to attempt to explain why being gay seems more common now than 50 years ago.) Anyway, for Gen X/Milennials, the traditional opposition to gay marriage from Boomers and previous generations was severely undermined by the prevalence of divorce among Boomers; why should younger generations take Boomers' moralizing about marriage seriously? This seems like a perfect issue for rebellion.

Another factor (technically fits under deluge I guess?): widespread access to pornography leading to men seeing lots of dicks which desensitized their natural disgust reaction to another man's dick having sex.

I'd put the desensitization under Mistake Theory - if you actually want a throbbing hard cock (in your porn), it doesn't matter whether that's because you're desensitized or it just isn't that gross - but they're not exactly natural categories. I'm more motioning around 'mistake' if it's about changing an average person's beliefs, and more 'deluge' if it's about changing policies or elite beliefs, but your framework may be more helpful for your perspective.

I hope for the mistake theory, but the more cynical I'm feeling the more The Crush seems plausible - not helped by the extreme unwillingness of anyone serious to engage with the possibility, even to recognize its failure in the trans stuff.

To temper that cynicism a little, I’d think that the “crush” scenario can only work, or at least only be really durable, when the “mistake theory” is also true (and probably with a “deluge” period in between). By the time “crush” factors were meaningfully coming into play, the overwhelming majority of the public was already on board with gay rights broadly, or at least cared so little about the issue that the opposition seemed at least as out-there as the supporters. This meant the only people being meaningfully “crushed” were easily written off by a supermajority of the public as wingnuts and weirdos. Certainly homophobia, especially the really hardcore type, has become drastically rarer in the US compared to, say, the 1980s, or even the 2000s. That win is organic and durable.

One could argue that this frame also describes the relative failure of the trans rights movement: trying to speedrun the deluge and ride the momentum straight into a crush, while skipping entirely over the long slog of boring acceptance into society which made the deluge -> crush political strategy actually work for gay rights.

That's true to an extent, but in turn it's easy to overstate it. Prop 8 got majority support in California at the same time that the Crush side was boycotting entire states or beating Brendan Eich in public. Much of the Crush side's successes came through expansive understandings of employment law, which only required only a small number of people to be persuaded (sometimes not even judges: a lawyer or HR head warning of potential liability is persuasive for big companies, even if they might win the eventual lawsuit).

trying to speedrun the deluge and ride the momentum straight into a crush, while skipping entirely over the long slog of boring acceptance into society which made the deluge -> crush political strategy actually work for gay rights.

Maybe. Another option's just that the terrain was rough. Both trans sports and puberty blockers had a pretty severe problem where they didn't work, and clearly didn't work, in a way that was hard for all but the most blinkered activists to deny, and which the Crush strategy could no longer serve to silence.

Not sure.

(Counterthought: If AIDS had hit in 2003, rather than the 1980s, would that have meant gay rights would have normalized in the Reagan era and then been marginalized again? Hit, but not marginalized by it? Or without the organization and tempering HIV politics caused, would they have stayed marginalized longer? Or would there have been a better reaction to the early stages of GRID, either internal or external?

Probably unknowable.)

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