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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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He's imagining the sexual revolution will ruin society. But it takes a while for the consequences to set in. Like eating your next year's seed corn will ruin your farm in a few months.

Thank you. As an aside, I can't help but think that Henry VIII initiating the English Reformation that separated the Church of England from papal authority and appointing himself Supreme Head of the Church of England to dissolve convents and monasteries for which he was excommunicated by the pope so that he could divorce his first wife Catherine to sexually pursue his wife's lady-in-waiting's sister was quite a revolution in the sexual world of England in 1509, and yet society was not ruined enough to not produce the grassroots social conservative activism in the 1960s. I struggle to see how the legal changes brought on by legalizing no-fault divorce and the sale of condoms and allowing women to own property and open bank accounts is more ruinous to a society than a society's government changing the fundamental religion of the country so that he could cheat.

My metaphor was much more literal than that. The corn of a society is its people. If your society has values that cause it to not reproduce itself, as ours does, it will simply cease to exist. Young people alive now will, if things don't change, see their societies wither to failure within their lifetimes. That seems to me to be an unambiguous lack of success. That it will leave a beautiful corpse is cold comfort.

There was quite a bit of grassroots resistance to the reformation in England and the Catholic Church has an entire category of saints associated with it(the English martyrs).

Notably also, the Anglican Church maintained until quite recently that divorce was impossible; Henry VIII’s annulment was based on a dispute as to whether Catherine of Aragon had consummated her marriage to his older brother before his death, which would have rendered the marriage impossible due to incest. The effect of the Anglican Church on marriage practices in England was restricted to a literal handful of cases.