In Which Direction Will Sexual Norms Be Imported?

An argument made by the pro-gay marriage crowd — one which Andrew RawMuscleGlutes Sullivan leaned on to prolapse his agenda into the social consciousness — is that marriage would “domesticate” gays because the wider social norms governing heterosexual marriage would infiltrate gay marriage.

Others warn that the sexual norms surrounding homosexuality would instead travel the opposite direction and infiltrate heterosexual marriage and corrode the institution over time. There are three powerful arguments for a gay –> straight transmission of sexual norms rather than a straight –> gay transmission of norms (and keep in mind gays have FAR MORE lifetime sexual partners and deviant predilections than heteros):

1. Through the courts. As the courts have essentially been corrupted into a legislative branch of the Left after a long wind into legal positivism, what happens is that the “problems of the penumbras” created by gay marriage and the legal wrangling to accommodate those penumbras will necessarily and inevitably be applied in kind to heterosexual marriage.
2. Precedent. The history of social movements is ever toward the Left. As chris wrote,
   

   “Now ask yourself, the people on the left pushing gay marriage. Do they have a history of trying to erode and dismantle the nuclear family, do they have a history of trying to erode and dismantle anti-cuckoldry laws and norms, do they have a history of trying to erode and dismantle Patriarchy? To answer the question is to illuminate their agenda with respect to gay marriage and the plausible direction that such equality will take.”

3. Perception. Sexuality underlies the whole reason for marriage, and we can take cues from the non-marital tributaries of the sexual market to see how marriage norms can shift. And we find for instance that perceived norms of sexual behavior have a bigger influence on teen sex behavior than does peer pressure. What we think is happening in society influences our personal decisions. Thanks to a 24/7 pozzed media pushing gayness into our homes, Americans consistently and vastly overestimate the number of gays. As the actual sexual practices of gays become normalized, straights will perceive gay abnormality as normal, and this shift in perception will energize a “progressive” shift in the courts. (Gay marriage went from a joke to majority approval in twenty years, partly from court activism helping to normalize the gay lifestyle. That’s the power of perception.) In this way, the extremes of sexual behavior tolerated by a society tend to pull the traditional norm in the direction of the novel norms.

Even if there was norm cross-over — that is, gay norms meeting hetero norms in the middle for a half-rainbow compromise — the effect would be to gay-ify society, since a norm imported to 98% of the population will have a much larger impact on overall society than would a norm imported to 2% of the population.

Novelty-seeking is a hallmark of atomized societies (hyper-individualism and lack of social connection drive people to seek novel experiences to fill the nihilistic void), and gay marriage with its attendant gay sexual norms is a novelty that a disintegrating society won’t be able to resist embracing.