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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Richard Hannania had an interest point on gay marriage yesterday. He like me has trouble making a direct attack on gay marriage.

I think there is no need for attack on "gay marriage", mostly because either gays were duped or "gay marriage" was just another in the long line of attacks on the very concept of marriage, I'd say even a paltry one compared to no-fault divorce proliferating in the society.

In fact I think that gay marriage only showed what was happening in the broader society for some time already, we do not have marriage - a sacred bond between man and a woman before god supported by the rest of the society morally and culturally. We only have "registered partnership", something like a special version of LLC that can be created and dissolved on a whim, with specific bankruptcy laws aimed at distributing wealth as well as children between the partners. In many cases the traditional marriage vow of - I take you to be my lawfully wedded (husband/wife), to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part - does not have value of breath spent to utter it, the vow can be broken in a few hours to laughter of wedding witnesses, especially if one party was "duped" somehow into believing such a nonsense.

I'd hope that by now people would be more knowledgeable of all the language games played out there, the words seem to hold some residual power despite having completely different and sometimes opposite meaning. There are other examples out there, often distorted by (mostly left) to suck up the power of the original concept. In the CW space there are myriads of such words like racism or violence up to basic words like man and woman. At a time to me it looks like some strange magical ritual, where people really believe in social construction of reality, as if words can expand their meaning beyond the practical limit inside the communication, that they will retain their original explanatory and cultural power, only with some toxic appendix feeding off of them invisible to the society at large somehow. Just repeat the mantra like "2022 marriage is real marriage" and the very fabric of reality changes to accommodate your wish. It does not work like that.