So, You Want To Marry A Dolphin?

Societies that replace tolerance with compelled affirmation risk losing the shared norms and boundaries that make civilization possible.

Allan J. Feifer | September 16, 2026

In 2005, Sharon Tendler, a British woman, “married” a dolphin named Cindy at Dolphin Reef in Eilat, Israel. Back in 2005, the widely reported story was amusing. Today, in retrospect, it seems like the opening bell for something much more damaging and real: the destruction of essential societal norms.

To survive and prosper, civilizations prioritize stability. Stability requires norms, and the West has taken a wrecking ball to many of the norms that once underpinned us. Not overnight, but gradually and relentlessly, norms seemed less necessary as a growing emphasis on individual freedom displaced the belief that individuals owed obligations to family, community, and society.

By the 1960s, a cultural revolution was underway. Tradition increasingly became something to question rather than inherit, and personal fulfillment began replacing duty as a measure of a successful life. Some old norms deserved to be discarded, but rejecting unjust norms gradually gave rise to the idea that we needed few restraints at all.

Into the vacuum came identity politics, which increasingly put the individual above society’s inherited standards and turned personal preference into a demand for social validation.

What followed resembles a landslide washing away boundaries that once defined acceptable behavior. Changes in attitudes toward sex, marriage, family, masculinity, personal responsibility, and dependence on public assistance would have been regarded with horror by earlier generations.

Not every deviation from an established norm is harmful, and some old norms were wrong. But many developed for important and consequential reasons. The problem comes when a society loses the ability to determine which deviations are harmless, which are beneficial, and which are........

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