Social Norms, Virtue, Enforcement

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/david-brooks-gay-marriage-changing-norms/

In the middle of a column about how norms change, David Brooks remarks, “There used to be a social penalty for supporting gay marriage. Now there’s a social penalty for not supporting it.” I am not at all sure that there was a significant social penalty, in almost any stratum of our society, for supporting same-sex marriage.

Indeed.

In the past, HAVING OPINIONS rarely involved sanction. The leading exception in relatively recent memory being the dreaded HUAC (House Un American Activities Committee) focused on comunists in the country potentially spying for the Soviets. "Are you now, or have you evern been a communist or communist sympathiser".

Today, "Do you now, or have you ever been a supporter or voter for Donald Trump" seems FAR more "reasonable" to the left. Along with support gay "marriage", or lose your job, position, etc. The list keeps lengthening -- transgender, privilege, cultural appropriation, etc.

American "Morality" once was the agreed to Judaeo-Christian, 10 Commandments, New Testament, God, Country, Mom, Hard Work, Salute the Flag, Apple Pie ...

Today, "morality" is the observance of the will of THE PARTY (D) ... Salute the Deep / Administrative State, gays, trans, Muslims, destruction of the Consituition, etc. If / when you fail to 100% comply, you are very likely to be sanctioned. "Virtue" today is compliance with THE PARTY.

That is the water in which we now swim.

It seems to me that there is an asymmetry between how social pressure worked back when same-sex marriage was a minority position and how it works now that it is a majority position. That asymmetry tends to reinforce some of Brooks’s larger points about how norms change. The traditionalist view was widely but, it turned out, often lightly held, and barely conscious of itself as a view. Marriage as the union of a man and a woman was just “the water in which we swam,” as Brooks describes the general functioning of norms. The progressive view is by contrast extremely conscious of its status as a view that can and should be socially enforced.