@Syaoran Li, when approaching topics that involve "traditionalism", generally makes no sense and evidently becomes frenzied because he doesn't get that our current cultural plight is mainly the communist chickens coming home to roost. However, what I can agree with is that they failed and rendered the culture fallow for the current cultural scourge because they were largely unable to argue well or argue in good faith.
They wanted to argue against gay marriage with the argument from nature and then got stumped when people brought up that homosexuality occurs in nature, and they kept appealing to the Bible without recognizing that the driving force of their opposition wasn't religious enough to care and they could in fact appeal to the purpose of the recognition of marriage inasmuch as the state is involved (to encourage the health of the family unit).
They wanted to mitigate premarital sex but hardly focused on the practicals of the act and its potential consequences, and instead told women that they were used goods if they had sex before marriage, extolled abstinence instead of
chastity, and idealized abstinence as something that-- if done correctly-- would provide the most perfect sexual and romantic experience, instead of describing it as a pragmatic and logical way (the most pragmatic and logical, among all the birth control methods) to avoid the even the slightest possibility of pregnancy and pair bonding with someone who you won't marry.
Most pertinently, they couldn't make a cogent argument against abortion without appeals to emotion and outright distortion and misuse of facts. "A child gains a heartbeat X days after conception", putting some other vapid pro-life stock slogan next to a newborn in order to invoke dread by association (wait, an abortion kills
that?)
, repeatedly describing the very rare late term abortion as the standard form-- none of that was meant to convince anyone on the other side or on the fence. At least, it
couldn't, and it completely missed the point because they were formed out of an obsession with
ingroup looks rather than
facts.
The last generation of traditionalists were self-serving, even when they looked like they were working to steer society's rudder in the right direction. Their arguments only worked for
them, and that was especially worthless since they never disagreed with the theses of said arguments. They effectively only kept their ground and made noise while they were there. They weren't intelligent when making their arguments. And because they cared nothing about outgroup optics or even outgroup comprehension, they allowed their opposition to claim the compassion ground and make their messaging that much better.
