MORAL NORMS

Normalizing and re-normalizing have nothing to do with "normal."  They are the most common kind of morality:  looking around to see what everyone else is doing.  It can be positive -- littering and smoking have been quite changed.  Or it can be negative, esp. when it's not something concrete and actual but rather a protocol like doing business.  I could quickly give you fifty examples of "cheating" that have become normal.  Like little omissions on taxes.  Like calling in sick when you aren't.

The most obvious changing norm has been sex, which was clearly fertility based morality and therefore vulnerable to an effective birth control method.  One of the most gut-level rules of fertility is a product of the European practice of inheritance, which treats a genetic descendent of a powerful person as an extension of that person and the woman who produces that descendent as livestock, her children as a crop.  

This has impact on the state-owned and religion-endorsed idea of marriage.  The reason "same sex" marriage between men is objected to is that they don't produce children.  Same sex marriage between women or sex outside marriage produces children who can't be attributed to a specific man.  Marriage among three people is too ambiguous about which is an extension and which is livestock, an asset or extention.

The impact of these assumptions is felt, but the fact that they are arbitrary is not often realized, because sexual matters are veiled in two ways: by romantic notions about attachment and by a kind of anti-romance which is formally "crime" defined by governments or evil defined by religious theory. (Educated Westerners love binary thought as worked out by Greek theory.)

As we are seeing, political dynamics are very much like sexual norms and entwined with them.  The effect of going to democracy, thus eliminating patriarchy as the godhead of kings and tyrants, has been as disruptive as birth control -- we might call it "succession control."  One class works hard to go back to the old way.

But fertility norms are also key to the nature of biological families, the production and attachment/identification of babies being one of the basic structures of society.  Happily, bonding happens that is not fertility-based.  

This is notoriously true of mafia "families" who develop a system of obligation, secrecy, and benefits.  This is inversely related to government functions: if the state is strong, mafia alternative is weak and vice versa.  In the case of the present USA, the state has gone to a new morality, that of wealth, which has allowed a minority to hoard basics like shelter and even justice, excluding huge categories of people.  This has made mafia strong enough to infiltrate government.  Maybe the proof that we've abandoned fertility is the foolishness of the leader's children and the lack of them in many cases.  

Sex is present as a perq of wealth.  Those who cling to the old ways must resort to criminalizing abortion and even more ridiculous stigma or criminal laws, all imposed on women.  We have not tried to use male castration to create a separate class, as we do with livestock.  

This could be treated as a sub-category of presentation. The following is from Wikipedia.  (You know, of course, that classically a "blog" is a web blog, a record of reading websites.)

"Normalization, or social normalization, is the process through which ideas and behaviors that may fall outside of social norms come to be regarded as "normal". In sociological theory, normalization appears in two forms.

First, the concept of normalization is found in the work of Michel Foucault, especially Discipline and Punish, in the context of his account of disciplinary power. As Foucault used the term, normalization involved the construction of an idealized norm of conduct – for example, the way a proper soldier ideally should stand, march, present arms, and so on, as defined in minute detail – and then rewarding or punishing individuals for respectively conforming to or deviating from this ideal. In Foucault's account, normalization was one of an ensemble of tactics for exerting the maximum social control with the minimum expenditure of force, which Foucault calls "disciplinary power". Disciplinary power emerged over the course of the 19th century, came to be used extensively in military barracks, hospitals, asylums, schools, factories, offices, and so on, and hence became a crucial aspect of social structure in modern societies."

"Second, normalization process theory is a middle-range theory used mainly in medical sociology and science and technology studies to provide a framework for understanding the social processes by which new ways of thinking, working and organizing become routinely incorporated in everyday work. Normalization process theory has its roots in empirical studies of technological innovation in healthcare, and especially in the evaluation of complex interventions"

These two definitions are opposed to each other, one dependent on preserving the old ways in spite of a world constantly being changed by technologies, and the other is the technology itself working to change society.  This is not necessarily happy when one thinks of something like the Chinese governments determination to forcibly brain wash minorities in camps.  But try thinking of it in terms of trans-national corporations using advertising and social platforms to create demand for their products, or at least cover for their motives and practises.  They propose a certain age and attraction associated with the practices they want.

The discipline that studies the second definition is still very new and is said here to come out of healthcare, which is more focused on death than birth, but also interested in prevention.  The newly born and the about-to-die are vulnerable populations which survive happily only when the social structure provides something like families to value them.  "Interventions" can quickly become "oppressions."

It is vital for group survival to preserve abnormalities in terms of individuals and groups.  One of the advantages of "freedom" is to allow them to develop and thrive because they are the source of growing edges, the innovations that may save us all in the future.  It is also an advantage of the "dark," the secrets and hiddenness that preserve them,