I’ve been thinking about what I want tagged, and the closest first stab I’ve come up with is “culture war stuff.”  Preferably “#culture war cw” or the like so I can just blacklist the phrase “culture war,” and also so it’s not specific to me and others can use it if they want.

Unfortunately, “culture war” is not as clearly defined as many things that people tag for.  If you’re not familiar with the term at all, Wikipedia’s article is pretty good.  The prototypical examples is people arguing for or against “traditional” anything.

Not all politics falls under “culture war” – basic and specific stuff like “Trump’s doing well” or “I’m scared of Trump” doesn’t, nor does stuff about economic policy or (usually) foreign intervention.  Any political topic where the phrase “way of life” would naturally turn up is probably a culture war topic.  Culture war topics may have policy implications, but they are fundamentally about how we live our lives and how others live them very differently.

Mere mention of culture war topics is not itself tag-worthy; the “war” part is also crucial.  This can take the form of people actually arguing about the different sides, but also of people talking about how horrible / stupid / etc. the other side is.

Taking “culture war positions” without fighting or alluding to the conflict is fine.  For instance, “can gay people be good parents” is seen as a culture war topic, but positive stories about gay parents are fine.  Much of the positively framed LBGTQ content on this sight would be seen as “culture war” stuff by someone on the other side, but I’m fine with it.  Posts about another black person getting killed don’t get tagged, but arguments over the pros and cons of the Black Lives Matter movement do.  Description of a single event that relates to feminism somehow is fine, discussion of large schisms within feminism are not.

The line here is mostly about conflict or the reminder that a topic is often the cause of conflict.  Generally, personal emotions or reports of individual stories are OK.

If this makes it any clearer, the reason this stuff bothers me specifically is that I have a lot of worries about how to be moral in a world where people have so many conflicting opinions, and I always feel like it’s too audacious to say that I “know better than” some great mass of people who disagree.  Culture war stuff reminds me of this very directly.  I tend, to a fault, to want to please everyone, and when I’m reminded that I’m in a bunch of situations where I have a choice between “these millions of people think I’m evil scum, or these other millions of people think I’m scum,” I frantically spin my mental wheels trying to find a (non-existent) solution.