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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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It depends on what is meant by socially conservative. In my experience, I see normalized antipathy towards homosexuality, open hostility towards trans, and very redpill sort of views towards gender.

OTOH, the churches seem more blatant about being scams, in the Heinleinian "snake oil shamans" sense.

I think this doesn’t give a great description of either what general working class Americans believe or what IRL hardline social conservatives believe.

IME most working class blacks have very similar social views to working class Anglo whites of the same age and background, for obvious reasons. In general for the working class this would be an attitude that plenty of women are crazy sociopathic gold diggers(although not all women are like that), that homosexuality is pretty messed up and marks out a male practitioner of it as somehow contaminated, but that doesn’t justify preventing them from marrying each other(or whatever else consenting adults want to do) even if they’re by default morally suspect, that trans have a mental illness and are mostly crazy perverts, churches in general exist to live off of 10% of social security checks except for the ones you’re personally well disposed to and on average it would be better to trust a random Christian of any denomination than a random person of no religion, and you should still believe in Jesus and going to church is a good thing unless you’re joining a cult, even if it’s not a very important good thing, that having lots of casual sex is bad, but you shouldn’t pry to much if it’s a man and anyways a man is supposed to be sexually active unless he’s really religious, domestic violence is wrong but it’s sometimes the woman’s fault she gets beat, and that abortion is wrong but sometimes understandable because occasionally rape causes pregnancy or there’s a baby with a severe disability(in which case the momma should consider getting sterilized in case it’s her bad genes) or a woman gets abandoned by her partner.

This isn’t a very politically correct set of beliefs, but it’s also not one which lines up very well with IRL(that is, not on twitter) social conservative hardliners either. Remember that around a fifth of Americans think homosexuality should be illegal, abortion should be hard banned no exceptions(usually with the view that the morning after pill is abortion), women shouldn’t work outside the home, porn should be banned, etc. This group doesn’t see eye to eye with the moderately conservative working class view I just laid out above. Actually they’ll have some pretty big disagreements. But they do, by and large, occupy the same space of ‘left of the media.