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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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We exist on an offshoot of an offshoot of the comments section of a psychiatry blogger who has openly practiced polyamory, and frequently discuss people like Aella, who promote sexual relations with multiple partners as an enlightened and superior alternative to monogamy. These discussions have been had here as recently as a few days ago.

Polyamory is also, as far as I can tell from my experience in it, rapidly becoming normalized in what's left of the atheist movement and the broader "nerdy woke people" subculture. Heck, my mom is an HR director in my conservative hometown, and lately had a job applicant who spoke openly about their poly lifestyle (they didn't get the job, mostly because they seemed legitimately crazy). This stuff is widespread, and I think it's more common in queer dating than straight dating. This is a slippery slope coming from the same people: gay people and nerdy woke people.

Maybe the slippery slope isn't leading to polygamy right now, exactly. But it has been, and is, pretty clearly leading to the normalization of polyamory. I think polyamory is more difficult to translate into the existing legal framework around marriage than gay marriage was. But if it weren't, I would be under no pretensions that Scott, and Aella, and Ozy (was he dating them at the same time?), and all the rest of the crew wouldn't be arguing their hearts out that recognizing plural marriages is a human rights issue (TM). As far as I'm concerned, it's just a matter of time.

Okay, I really thought about including this as an aside, because it was a much closer prediction. I agree that polyamory has gotten much closer to the mainstream. It is a bit weird that it’s done so without getting any traction in, say, divorce law.

Regardless, the OP is not regretting support for gay marriage because the religious were right about polyamory. I’m arguing that current trans issues are poor evidence for this slippery slope model, since they were neither predicted in the model nor obviously caused by gay marriage.

Is it true that gay activists, with their goal achieved, moved on to other progressive causes? Sure. Was keeping them occupied the reason people were intent on “defending marriage”? I don’t think so.