“State” (with a capital “S”) refers to one of the United States, and “States” refers to two or more of them. “State” and “States,” thus used, are proper nouns because they refer to a unique entity or entities: one or more of the United States, the union of which, under the terms and conditions stated in the Constitution, is the raison d’être for the nation. I reserve the uncapitalized word “state” for a government, or hierarchy of them, which exerts a monopoly of force within its boundaries.
Marriage, in the Western tradition, predates the state and legitimates the union of one man and one woman. As such, it is an institution that is vital to civil society and therefore to the enjoyment of liberty. The recognition of a more-or-less permanent homosexual pairing as a kind of marriage is both ill-advised and illegitimate. Such an arrangement is therefore a “marriage” (in quotation marks) or, more accurately, a homosexual cohabitation contract (HCC).
The words “liberal”, “progressive”, and their variants are usually enclosed in quotation marks (sneer quotes) because they refer to persons and movements whose statist policies are, in fact, destructive of liberty and progress. I sometimes italicize the words, just to reduce visual clutter.
I have reverted to the British style of punctuating in-line quotations, which I followed 40 years ago when I published a weekly newspaper. The British style is to enclose within quotation marks only (a) the punctuation that appears in quoted text or (b) the title of a work (e.g., a blog post) that is usually placed within quotation marks.
I have reverted because of the confusion and unsightliness caused by the American style. It calls for the placement of periods and commas within quotation marks, even if the periods and commas don’t occur in the quoted material or title. Also, if there is a question mark at the end of quoted material, it replaces the comma or period that might otherwise be placed there.
If I had continued to follow American style, I would have ended a sentence in a recent post with this:
… “A New (Cold) Civil War or Secession?” “The Culture War,” “Polarization and De-facto Partition,” and “Civil War?“
What a hodge-podge. There’s no comma between the first two entries, and the sentence ends with an inappropriate question mark. With two titles ending in question marks, there was no way for me to avoid a series in which a comma is lacking. I could have avoided the sentence-ending question mark by recasting the list, but the items are listed chronologically, which is how they should be read.
I solved these problems easily by reverting to the British style:
… “A New (Cold) Civil War or Secession?”, “The Culture War“, “Polarization and De-facto Partition“, and “Civil War?“.
This not only eliminates the hodge-podge, but is also more logical and accurate. All items are separated by commas, commas aren’t displaced by question marks, and the declarative sentence ends with a period instead of a question mark.
For much more see “Writing: A Guide“.
Politics and Prosperity 
Thanks for the comment about my “Going Out with Style” post.
“Though Khawaja and I disagree about a lot, I believe that we agree about the fatuousness of bleeding-heart libertarianism.”
I wouldn’t put it quite that way. The only criticism I have of “bleeding heart libertarianism” is that I don’t think it’s a form of libertarianism at all. But since I’m not a libertarian myself, that’s not much of an objection. And since “bleeding heart libertarianism” is more of a branding device than the name of a unified doctrine, it’s hard to criticize it in a doctrinal way. I’m actually pretty sympathetic to a lot of what goes by the name “bleeding heart libertarianism.” Some of it is just garden-variety liberalism with a free market twist. That’s music to my ears. I don’t regard it as fatuous at all.
To the left of that is anarchist left-libertarianism. That isn’t really my cup of tea (to mix metaphors), but regardless, one anarchist left-libertarian, Roderick Long, blogs both for BHL and for Policy of Truth. I often disagree with Roderick on politics, but don’t regard anything he says as fatuous, no matter how much I disagree.
What I object to at BHL is less doctrinal than personal. Some but not all of the bloggers there have a real contempt for the audience of the blog. Given that contempt, it’s unclear what they think they’re doing when they’re blogging. Writing for feedback from an audience? Or expressing contempt for that audience, then cutting it off when the going gets rough?
The worst offender by far is Jason Brennan–deceitful, arrogant, vulgar, hypocritical, and sometimes just downright stupid, not because he has a low IQ, but because he seems to take pride in descending to certain rhetorical depths in an argument, especially when he’s losing. I object to the fact that BHL put up with this for as long as it has. No blogger at PoT has ever done anything like that, and if one did, I’d throw him off the site without delay. If Brennan had done at my site what he did for years at BHL, I would have banned him for life years ago. They didn’t. They spent years pretending that when Jason acted out, that was just Jason being Jason, and Jason being Jason was just a kind of sunk cost of having Jason the Prolific Powerhouse Philosopher write for your blog. It isn’t. It’s always possible to get rid of something noxious and troubling. Just hit delete and it’s gone. I just did that to a whole job. But they had trouble doing it to Jason Brennan.
To their credit, once confronted, they took action. They reined Jay in–told him to stop deleting my comments, stop acting so overtly like an asshole, etc. And it’s worked. Good for them. That’s not fatuous; it’s to their credit. I’m sincerely grateful to them.
Meanwhile, I’ve never treated Brennan at PoT the way he’s treated me. I’ve never deleted his stuff, never blocked him, never changed stuff I’ve said in response to stuff he’s said. I always let him say what he wants in all of its predictable stupidity, and move on.
There are lesser versions of Brennan at BHL, but they differ from him in kind, not just by degree. Fernando Teson, for instance, writes irresponsibly fact-free junk on the Israel-Palestine issue, but falls silent when you challenge him. That’s not quite as bad as Brennan, but it’s not great.
Having made these criticisms, I should say that one person at that site, Kevin Vallier, is so ridiculously courteous to his critics that his courtesy almost seems to compensate for Brennan’s obnoxiousness. Almost, but not quite.
So whatever fatuousness I attribute to BHL is much narrower than what you have in mind. Some of what you regard as fatuousness is stuff I like. If it was fatuous, then I would be fatuous! That seems like a reductio ad absurdum.
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As I said, disagree about a lot. But we are in complete agreement about Jason Brennan.
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